Table of Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

ABOUT ELSA JADE

Wolves of Angels Rest: Book 8

WISH UPON A WEREWOLF

A Mating Season Holiday Story

Elsa Jade

Website | New Release Alert | Facebook

Annie Belle hitchhiked to Angels Rest with one dangerous Christmas wish: to be bitten by a werewolf. Blaze Domingo swore he’d never take a mate, and the dead of winter is the wrong season for mating. But Annie is making all of his silent wishes come true...

Copyright © 2015 by Elsa Jade

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

WISH UPON A WEREWOLF BY ELSA JADE

Annie is asking for one Christmas gift: a werewolf’s bite.

But Blaze wants to give her so much more…

Annie Belle hitchhiked to Angels Rest with one dangerous Christmas wish: to be bitten by a werewolf. Blaze Domingo swore he’d never take a mate, and the dead of winter is the wrong season for mating. But Annie is making all of his silent wishes come true.

1

As the red lights of the truck faded into the distance, the night suddenly seemed much colder to Annie Belle.

And December in the town of Angels Rest at the heart of Where-the-Hell-Are-We, U.S.A. was already freakin’ cold.

Good thing she was here to get a real wolf-skin coat.

She trudged through the dusting of dry snow covering the gravel turnoff where her ride had dropped her. She’d had to sit through the standard “if you were my granddaughter” speech since Albuquerque, but she was finally here so she’d call it a win.

But when she turned to look at the empty desert, a chill wind touched the bruise on her cheek, making it throb again, and her notion of a win seemed pretty sad.

Against the background of pinprick stars, the neon sign over her head seemed too bright. Hard to believe werewolves would hang out in a grungy old roadhouse like this Gypsy’s place. Weren’t they all billionaires? No wait, that was vampires. She’d never had a chance to get into the whole book boyfriend thing, so they all sort of mixed together in her head. But she knew she didn’t want a billionaire.

She wanted a killer.

On the bar’s front porch, she braced herself on the evergreen-wrapped rail and knocked off the snow that clung to the smooth soles of her sneakers. Needed to make a good impression. She pulled forward a few strands of her blond hair to disguise the bruise. Hopefully the lighting inside would be crappy enough to hide the shadings of green and yellow under her left eye.

Maybe they’d just assume a white trash chick like her didn’t know shit about makeup. Taking a slow breath, she reached for the latch under the holly wreath and pushed open the door.

Warmth—welcome against her chilled skin and rich with the scent of hops—swirled out to wrap around her. The music was a beat behind.

“I want snow swirling in the sky,

and a fire burning in the hearth.

Gifts are underneath the tree.

And joy is in our hearts.”

The chorus kicked in as she crossed the threshold.

“I want a hometown Christmas.

I want a country Christmas.

Let’s make it the merriest Christmas this year.”

Annie hummed along, mostly to take the edge off her nerves.

Would they bite her as soon as she walked in? Would they pretend to be human?

She’d heard whispers about the werewolves in Angels Rest, but she didn’t know exactly how the whole thing worked.

“Close the door,” yelled somebody by the jukebox. “You’re letting winter in behind ya.”

Hastily, she pulled the door shut and forced herself to take her hand off the knob. She wanted to kick her own butt. Why was she hesitating now, after she’d come all this way?

But her heart pounded like an angry fist in her chest, making her stomach churn.

For a place allegedly infested with infernal, unnatural monsters, the inside of Gypsy’s looked like every other bar she’d ever sneaked into. Had she really thought they’d have human heads with glassy eyeballs mounted on the wall?

Well, maybe.

Seemed fair, considering humans did that to other animals. Humans were the real monsters lurking under the bed. She didn’t even want to be human anymore.

If there was anywhere on Earth she could change that, it was Angels Rest.

She glanced around the bar, cataloging the patrons: a dozen or so at round tables, a few cozied up to the jukebox and laugh-arguing over the selections, two at the pool table.

The guy lining up his shot made her hesitate.

Oh, he looked like her kind of trouble. Tall but lanky, as if he hadn’t quite finished growing into his troublesomeness. His jeans fit him like a second skin, and a snow-white T-shirt stretched taut across his shoulders. The sleeves tugged up a little to reveal matching arm-band tattoos in a tribal design she didn’t recognize. Not Native or Celtic or Norse. Something older than any of those. The ink seemed to whirl in front of her eyes like black snow. She wanted to grab on and hold tight, so she didn’t get lost in the midnight storm.

A lock of dark hair fell across his high forehead as he leaned down to eyeball his options. The beer promo light overhead, decorated with tinsel swag, cast harsh shadows under the hard edges of his cheekbones, giving him a hungry look.

What she wouldn’t give to be the focus of those shockingly pale eyes. Blue? Green? No, a churn of the two, like the ocean she’d never seen in real life or one of the most expensive pieces of jewelry in that one mall store that didn’t let people like her through the door.

A low curl of heat tightened in her belly, strangling the nervousness. She let out a soundless breath. She always felt better when she was on the prowl. At least she knew how this mistake would end.

She brought herself up short. She wasn’t here to get in trouble.

She was here to get bitten, which would get her out of trouble.

Turning her back on the guy who would’ve been a great buyer’s remorse Christmas present that she couldn’t afford, she bee-lined for the bar, stripping out of her too-thin denim coat.

Only one woman commanded the narrow space between the gleaming wood and the glass bottles on the wall. Her sleeve tattoos rivaled the neon outside for garishness.

“Gypsy,” Annie said.

Without looking at her, the woman held up one finger, tallied something on the cash register, and—still without looking—spun around with a tumbler of whiskey that she slid down the bar to an older man at the end.

The glass came to rest directly in front of him.

Annie pursed her lips, impressed.

The bartender grabbed a rag, wiping at a non-existent smudge, as her gaze scanned the room. “What can I get you?”

“A job.”

Finally stilling, the woman blinked. “I know you?”

The question was only half a question. The other half was testimony: I know you.

Resentment stiffened Annie’s jaw. Everyone thought they could read her like a book. A book with only blank pages between the covers.

“And a beer,” she added.

Gypsy quirked one eyebrow. “ID?”

Annie dragged the plastic card from the wallet in her back pocket. “It’s a fake. But a good one. I know fake IDs, so if you need a bouncer, I can eighty-six the jailbait for you.”

The other eyebrow went up, and that piercing gaze spent more time on Annie than on the ID. “It is good.” Her other hand worked the soda gun, seemingly without her attention, and she pushed that in front of Annie.

Annie slid it down the bar.

It came to rest with just the faintest clink against the man’s other glass. He looked up with surprise then shrugged and mixed the whiskey and coke together.

Gypsy snorted. “You’re just a little too young for the serving age around here, sorry. Anyway, the tips aren’t good enough this time of year to justify your time.”

“I don’t need much,” Annie said. She hesitated, then took a risk—it was just her stupid pride, after all—and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Never had much anyway.”

The bartender’s gaze stayed on the bruise long enough that the mark throbbed again, as if a thumb was pressing into the half-healed flesh.

Yeah, the bruise said who she was even more clearly than her real ID.

The rag in Gypsy’s hand never stopped. “Stay through closing and I’ll tip you out. Sheriff’s deputy comes in, back door is thattaway.” She hooked her thumb over her shoulder.

Annie nodded. “Law’s a hardass around here?”

“Worse, he’s my brother.”

“Brothers are bad,” Annie said. “But ex-boyfriends are the worst.”

“Table four”—Gypsy pointed out each table quickly—“needs topped off. They give you any guff, tell ‘em Gypsy said to shut up.”

For a roadhouse in the middle of nowhere at the ass-end of the year, Gypsy’s kept Annie hopping. Seemed to keep everyone hopping, actually. She helped push tables aside to make room in front of the jukebox for a few brave dancers. When the twirls got a little too exuberant and the music died abruptly, she plugged the power cord back in before the dancers even stumbled to a halt.

“Whoops.” The woman who’d tripped over the cord grinned at her. “Huckleberry wine makes me dizzy.”

“Thunder shouldn’t swing you so far,” somebody shouted.

She laughed. “He can swing me anywhere, anytime.”

The older man who’d taken Annie’s coke whirled his woman again. “We just need more practice.”

Were they werewolves? Huckleberry wine and dancing seemed…not killer-y enough.

Annie eyed each drinker she served, but not a one flashed fangs. At this rate, it’d be the New Year before she was a new her.

And she didn’t have that kind of time.

She was slipping around the backside of the pool table with a full tray of empties when one of the players grabbed her above the elbow.

Every nerve in her body red-lined.

He always grabbed her there.

She froze, clenching her muscles to stop herself from swinging the heavy tray in defense.

“Hey, honey,” the guy said. “Ya bring another beer on your way back?”

“Let her go, Sanchez,” said the other player—the one she’d noticed when she first walked in.

She locked her gaze on him, holding her breath and holding his glittering blue-green eyes as her focus rather than the grip on her arm.

Which fell away at his command.

She let out the stale breath in a series of jittering huffs.

“You want anything, Blaze?” The oblivious guy who’d waylaid her reached for the cue chalk.

But Blaze—he didn’t blaze, though, he smoldered—never looked away. “No,” he said. “I don’t want anything.”

Then, very deliberately, he turned back to the pool table, leaving her staring at his profile and the birthmark on the side of his face.

She wasn’t sure how she had missed it before. Maybe because of the shadows from the overhead light. The mark was as big as a hand slap across his cheek, red and angry.

She doubted anyone had ever slapped him. He couldn’t be that much older than her, but he moved with a dangerous take-no-shit grace that seemed to mock the way she’d frozen and stuttered.

He hunched one shoulder into the cue stick, covering the stain from her view. She might’ve thought he was just carefully angling his shot, but under the weight of her stare, he miscued. The tip of the stick shot past the cue ball without touching. When his friend barked out a laugh, he snarled back. The sound raised hackles on the back of her neck.

Then Gypsy whistled, and Annie hustled back to the bar.

Maybe this guy—Blaze—was the right kind of trouble, after all.

2

Blaze finished the game without embarrassing himself again, but he wasn’t really paying attention, even when Sanchez whined about a particularly sick bank shot he hadn’t called.

Every bit of his awareness was locked on the new girl.

Lots of people came through Angels Rest—well, lots compared to the rest of the empty desert—and most stopped in at Gypsy’s at some point or another. But he’d never seen her.

Long blond hair swung around her shoulders like the swirling mix of sand and snow that mesmerized tired drivers on the lonely highways and left them in ditches around the Four Corners.

Not that he had ever done that.

He’d managed to catch himself right before he’d gone over the edge.

Anyway, he was smarter now. He kept his eyes on his own work and didn’t bother no one.

But his eyes weren’t the only problem tonight.

He’d caught her scent as soon as she walked in the door—just like every other shifter in the place. She smelled like…like something he needed to stick his nose in to get a better whiff.

That lucky bastard Thunder had caught him mooning and just grinned. But Thunder already had someone to dance with, someone to go home with, someone to hold through the long winter nights—he had found his true mate.

Last spring, three wolves in Angels Rest, including the pack alpha, had found true mates. Pheromones ran strong and fast during the mating season, and the light of the mating moon cemented the bond that linked kindred shifter souls.

But true mates didn’t exactly grow on trees, and trees were sort of spindly and stubby around here anyway. Many gave up hope of finding someone.

Blaze reminded himself that he was one of those. He wasn’t allowed to hope.

But like his eyes and his nose, the rest of his body wasn’t getting the message. He found his muscles aching to turn toward her, to keep her always as his north star. His skin prickled like a breeze passed over him every time she swept by.

It was his wolf, twisting restlessly inside him. It wanted her.

This was the absolute wrong season, though. There was no way the wolf could be on the hunt for a mate.

For a meal, maybe…

Just a taste to last through the cold, hungry dark until spring.

He stayed until last call, only reluctantly moving outside when Gypsy gave him the look she normally reserved for sloppy drunks and males who called her “hon”.

“Nothing else for you here tonight, Blaze,” she said in a low voice. “Come back tomorrow.”

Maybe she hadn’t looked at a clock, but it was already tomorrow.

He’d sent Sanchez home without him. No sense both of them hanging around like starving junkyard dogs. When he stepped out of the roadhouse into the teeth of the wind, he remembered he’d left his jacket in his friend’s car.

Well hell, maybe the chill would remind his wolf that this wasn’t the mating season.

He stared up at the black-velvet sky studded with stars. The threat of snow stung his nostrils, and he sucked in a deep lungful, hoping to cool the wolf’s impatience.

Instead, he caught the perfume that had haunted him all night.

This time, though, he was clear-headed enough to sort through the odors: beer, of course, and the sharper tang of whiskey—she’d spilled some on herself—plus the muddy stink of diesel. She must’ve been stuck in a truck for a good long while. Under that, a touch of sweat; she’d hustled for tips, and he’d been impressed with how high she piled her bus tub, hefting the gray plastic bin to her shoulder with ease. She was no stranger to hard work.

But under all of that was the scent of her: a winter-blooming jasmine, light and sweet and tough.

The neon light overhead went dark, and she walked down the porch steps before turning her face to the sky, just as he had. Her hair was silver and shadow under the cold stars.

The wolf’s cry leaped into his throat, a howl of claiming.

He choked it down when Gypsy followed her off the steps.

“Good work tonight, Annie,” the bar owner said. “Here’s your cut.”

Annie. The wolf adored the way the name sounded like an eager howl. Aah-eee! The beast shivered in him.

Gypsy counted out a ragged stack of bills but stopped short of handing them over. “You got a place to stay tonight?”

Yes, thought the wolf in its instinctive, wordless way. With us.

“Not really,” was the reply. “But there’s a motel up the road, right?”

“Nobody’ll answer your knock this late,” Gypsy said. “But there’s a single-wide out back of the bar. You’re welcome to it for the rest of the night.”

Gypsy’s grandmother—the first Gypsy—had lived there her whole life. Some said her ghost was there still, keeping watch over the sloppy drunks who slept off their overindulgences while their keys stayed behind the bar. Maybe keeping watch too over the souls of men who called bartenders “hon”.

Annie hesitated. “If it’s no trouble.”

“Less trouble for me than lying awake wondering if you’re hitching to the next town.”

She’d hitchhiked to Angels Rest? Why? Some were born in Angels Rest. Some got caught when they ran out of gas or ran out of reasons to keep running. But who made plans—shitty plans, apparently—aimed at the middle of the Four Corners, where four whole states didn’t bother putting anything important?

Annie shuffled her feet, sneakers crunching on the half-frozen gravel. “I don’t know…”

The wolf wanted to nip at her heels, to drive her back into the warmth and light. Blaze growled low in his throat, a subvocal warning to anything in the world that might threaten her.

Gypsy scanned the darkness, but he knew her senses would be dulled by the overwhelming scents and jukebox tunes.

“Well,” she said at last. “Hounding never convinced nobody of nothing. But if you want to stay, the key is under the lawn gnome. Make sure there’s no one sleeping in the bed before you jump in. And lock the bedroom door so you don’t find anyone besides you sleeping there when you wake up.”

Blaze’s wolf huffed to itself in surprise. Maybe the wily bar owner was perfectly aware he was there after all.

“If you’re sure,” Annie said.

“I’m offering you the place cuz nothing’s sure,” Gypsy said.

Annie snickered. “That was on the bottom of one of the beer caps.”

“We take our wisdom where we find it, yeah?” Gypsy smiled back.

“Yeah,” Annie replied softly. “Thanks.”

Gypsy nodded and walked away with a backward wave.

Blaze was furious she’d left Annie alone in the winter night.

The wolf was delighted.

Together, they shadowed Annie to the trailer.

The part of him that walked on two legs knew he was being stalker-y. The four-legged part had no idea what he was talking about: stalking was for rabbits and deer, and his Aah-eee was going to be much tastier than any other prey.

His third leg… Well, damn.

He’d slept in the trailer himself, last year on his twenty-first birthday, thanks to Sanchez’s bottomless shots. They’d made it as far as the living room before passing out, and they’d stumbled out the next morning, still mostly drunk, to run off their hangovers in the first light of day.

Tonight, he was stone-cold sober. Emphasis on the cold.

Double emphasis on the stone, according to his dick.

Annie shivered as she crouched next to the world’s ugliest lawn gnome and retrieved the key. In the bar, her snug jeans with the hole over the knee and the worn sneakers had looked shabby-casual. Out here, the glimpse of her tender skin in the trailer’s yellow door light made his chest tighten. He would willingly give her the clothes off his back.

More than willingly. The wolf writhed against the confines of his jeans.

Its intensity pinned him in place more firmly than winter’s bite. He shouldn’t be here, as man or beast.

Annie—Aah-eee—wasn’t theirs to hunt. She was just a human, and he had no right to stick his nose into whatever had brought her to Angels Rest.

He took a step back, fighting the wolf to fade into the black.

She straightened and thrust the key toward the lock, just one step away from closing him out.

And she dropped the key. It bounced off the step and into the frost-crisped grass.

A sound—half curse, half sob—burst from her, and he realized suddenly how close she was to the edge. She’d seemed so strong, yet light on her feet, hauling the bus tub between the tables and dancers. The silky hair that had set his fingers twitching slid forward to hide her face as she knelt, patting around her feet for the key.

But she couldn’t see it with her human eyes, especially not with the tears he scented, salty and bitter.

The wolf was at her side even before the key, warmed by her hand, had melted the frost.

“Here.” He nudged the damp metal within reach of her searching fingers.

She gasped and flinched back.

This was the closest he’d been to her all night, and the essence of her was more intoxicating than any bottle on Gypsy’s shelves. He knew better than to grab her—he’d seen how she went fatally still when Sanchez had tugged at her arm—but it took all his might to stop himself from reaching for her.

He’d tell himself it was just to steady her, but then she’d be in his arms, and then—

“Are you going to bite me?”

He dropped back on his ass in shock, and the chill of the frozen step nipped through his jeans. “What?”

Her voice was breathy. “Are you…are you going to bite me now?”

The cold under his nuts should have put his lust on ice. Instead, her question sent a rush of anticipation boiling through his veins, and he thought he might erupt right then and there.

“If you—” He swallowed hard to erase the rest of his words.

If you want me to I will.

That would be the answer to anything she asked. The naked longing in her gaze was too much. It wrenched at places inside him that had never been touched, deeper even than the wolf.

She wanted him. And he’d never been wanted.

Very slowly, so slow he thought the half-frozen resin in the pinyon pines must be faster, he reached out to touch her hair.

Ah, just as silky as he’d imagined. Living his whole life in the desolate desert shadow of Mesa Diablo, he’d never touched anything as soft except maybe the cottonwood fluff that drifted through the air in the very hottest days of summer.

And though tonight was one of the coldest and darkest nights of the year, he felt himself burning up.

She didn’t move, just stared at him.

She had dark eyes, a striking contrast to her fine, pale hair. Even his sharp wolf vision couldn’t find the line between pupil and iris though he searched and searched.

“What are you looking for?” Her breathiness took on a slight edge. “Is there a secret or a trick?”

“A trick to what?” He barely found his own voice. The wolf just wanted to keep staring at her, the strand of her hair still in his grasp as if she might try to run away.

“To getting bitten,” she said with a touch of impatience. “To becoming a werewolf.”

Even the wolf blinked at that, finally breaking her spell.

“Werewolf?” he repeated dumbly.

Hot color blazed across her cheeks, and she pulled back, tightening the lock of her hair between them. “Never mind. I—”

But her blush caught his attention. He looped the hair behind her ear to expose her cheek.

This time fury not lust exploded in him. But he kept his voice low. “Who hit you?”

The blood fled from her face, that part of her beyond his reach though the wolf wanted to give chase, to bring back her hectic summer color.

“Never mind,” she said again. “You shouldn’t be here. Gypsy said no one else should be here.”

“Gypsy’s my cousin,” he said. No point explaining that in a way all shapeshifters were cousins since they shared the same extraordinary ability to transform. “And she’d destroy whoever hit you.”

Annie bit her lip, bringing back a spot of red. “But would she make me a werewolf?”

His wolf circled inside him, wary and intrigued, the restless thud of its paws matching his confused heartbeat. “Is that why you hitchhiked to Angels Rest? To find werewolves?”

She shook her head, knocking the hair back into her face. “Not find werewolves. Be a werewolf.”

He stared at her, then finally held out his hand. “Give me the key.”

Inside the small trailer was almost as cold as outside, but he went to the gas fireplace and cranked it up until the flames were almost scary.

Felt like that inside him too.

Gypsy—the original one—had updated the trailer sometime in the 1950s. The couch and chairs, finned like the cars from the era, were a little saggy, but somehow the harvest gold and avocado colors fit the desert mood. For Annie’s sake, he clicked on the overhead light that looked like some sort of weird spaceship. Half the bulbs were burned out since werewolves didn’t usually bother with lights, which gave the fixture the look of a spaceship about to crash.

Yeah, he felt like that too.

Annie still stood by the door, her arms wrapped around her middle, making herself smaller. That wasn’t right; she should at least take the space that was hers.

He let the prowling wolf circle behind her and nudge her closer to the fireplace.

Finally she held her hands out to the warmth. “Look,” she said, though she kept her gaze on the fire. “I made a mistake—”

“Is that what he said when he hit you?”

That brought her eyes up, reflected flames snapping in the dark depths. “No, he totally meant to hit me. Every single time.”

His wolf stilled, prelude to an attack. But there was no deserving victim in reach.

Blaze breathed out slowly. “So you want to stop him next time.”

“There can’t be a next time.” Her outstretched hands fell to her sides and tightened into fists. “But yeah, I’m going to stop him.”

“By becoming a werewolf?” He couldn’t restrain the disbelieving note in his question, even though he knew it would piss her off. “Have you thought about something less drastic? Like, going to the police. Or, I dunno, shooting him.”

Sure enough, the flame behind her eyes turned to ice. “Like I didn’t think of that.” Derision dripped in melting icicles. “But I don’t want to end up dead myself or in jail. He doesn’t get the rest of my life.”

“So you’re going to give your life to a bunch of hairy, cursed monsters instead?”

He expected her to waver. She must be exhausted by the night of hustling on top of however long she’d traveled to get here, on top of whatever exactly had been done that was bad enough to push her this far.

To his surprise, she held herself straighter. “Do you know where I can find one?”

The pack alpha was going to freak when he found out the werewolves of Angels Rest were attracting groupies.

“You can’t just go around asking people to bite you,” he said.

“They wouldn’t be people,” she countered. “They’ll be werewolves.”

“Werewolves are people too. Sort of. Just…different.”

She brightened, practically replacing the burned-out bulbs. Oh fuck, he’d all but confessed that she’d come to the right place to get bitten by a werewolf.

His pulse skittered at the thought of what his alpha would do. Kane Villalobos had found his true mate, but being mated hadn’t mellowed him. The bond had only made him stronger, more dogged about protecting the pack against any threat.

But when Annie took a slow step toward him, Blaze realized the true threat was much, much closer.

3

He was a werewolf!

Annie shivered, but not with cold this time. Him being a werewolf was why she’d been drawn to him and his tight jeans as soon as she’d walked into the bar.

He had what she wanted, what she needed.

She sidled toward him, her sneakers slipping over the shag carpet. This was how a hunter felt…

But could she take him? Rolled warily to the balls of his steel-toed boots, he was half a foot taller than she was. The black-inked marks peeking out from under his sleeves writhed as his muscles tensed, and his blue-green eyes locked on her with the strength of one of those fancy liqueurs at Gypsy’s that looked so pretty but she knew would knock her on her ass.

She was good at predicting the chances of violence or extortion in any given situation, but all her guesses were failing her now. Would she get what she wanted, or was she going to get hurt? She chewed at her lower lip uncertainly.

His gaze arrowed to her mouth, and the weight of his focus felt like he was touching her already.

Oh yeah, guess that answered that.

She stalked forward another step and at the same time shrugged her jacket off her shoulders. The denim slumped to the floor behind her like an empty skin.

Blaze held his ground. “You’re making a mistake.”

She shrugged. “That’s how I’ve gotten this far.”

She meant it to be sarcastic, a slam against herself if he wasn’t going to take the swing. But instead, for once, she thought maybe she was in a good place.

Far from home, with a stranger, who she was pretty sure was a werewolf.

What did it say about the rest of her life that this was probably going to be the highlight?

When the toes of her sneakers were almost right against his boots, she stopped and looked up at him. “How does this work? Do I bend my head and you bite my neck?”

His eyes glittered under the dark lock of hair falling across his brow. “I think that’s vampires.”

“Damn it. I always get those confused.” She tilted her head anyway, her muscles turning soft and warm under the heat of his stare. “Don’t you know the difference?”

“I don’t go around biting little girls.”

She put one hand on her hip, drawing his attention downward where she knew he wouldn’t be able to miss the curve of her booty. “I ain’t little.”

“To me you are.”

Maybe that was the sort of thing big girls like her thought they wanted to hear, but she didn’t want to be small, not in his eyes.

That blue-green glow gave her a boldness that usually came along only with the booze she sneaked with her fake ID.

She lifted her hand, hesitated, then flattened her palm in the center of his chest.

For a second, she didn’t feel his heartbeat—oops, maybe he was a vampire after all—then the furious bang raced away under her touch, and his chest swelled on a silent gasp.

Oh, he’d been holding his breath.

Waiting for her touch.

She leaned toward him, knowing the V-neck of her shirt would let him see down between her breasts. No man could resist wondering what else was down there. As if it would be such a big surprise.

But Blaze’s eyes never wavered from hers.

Of course not. Because he wasn’t a man.

As crazy as the thought was, somehow it reassured her she was right to do this.

“I can’t promise you anything,” he said.

“I wouldn’t believe you anyway.”

“It’ll hurt.”

“Everything does.”

She wasn’t being snarky, only telling him the truth. But his eyes narrowed and he grabbed her chin, forcing her to meet his stare. “Don’t make light of this. Getting bitten is…dangerous. You could die.”

“You think I’d come here for fun? Gypsy’s jukebox isn’t that great.” She shrugged off his grip and shook back her hair, so he couldn’t miss the bruise. “I’m lucky I’m not dead already. For Christmas last year, my ex gave himself a bottle of tequila and gave me an overnight vacation in the ER. Well, I’m getting my own gift this year: a werewolf’s bite. I know what you are, so don’t try to lie to me, because I’m as done with getting lied to as I am with being smacked around. Is it going to be you or someone else?”

“Annie.” With a low groan she felt more than heard, he anchored one arm at the small of her back and reeled her closer.

She tilted her head back, closing her eyes. This was what she’d come for, but she couldn’t stop the quiver that went down her spine. She knew he’d feel it under his fingertips. Her own hands crept up to tighten on his biceps, a second set of arm bands, in case he tried to get away.

But instead of a piercing pain in her neck, a fleeting puff of heated breath on her lips jolted her eyes open, just as his mouth settled over hers.

He kissed like he shot at pool: a deft alignment and then a thrust that went all the way through her, scattering her thoughts. He stroked his tongue across the seam of her lips, opening her wide. Her senses bounced and rebounded, and she inhaled the wild taste of mesquite and snow and the hot embers that were Blaze.

Under her grasping hands, his biceps bunched, and she realized hazily that he was turning her toward the couch. He laid her out on the mustard-brown cushions, but he was barely perched there himself, one knee pressing hard against the outer curve of her thigh.

Was he going to try to leave her there? She skimmed her hand up inside the hem of his T-shirt. He sucked in a startled breath, and she ticked one fingertip down the muscled ridges of his abdomen to hook in the waistband of his jeans.

She held him there with her finger. “Is this how you turn someone into a werewolf?”

“It’s how you turn on a werewolf,” he muttered.

She tried to laugh, but her heart seemed to be skipping every other beat, as if it wanted to fill in the gaps with the heavy pulse she saw beating in the hollow of his throat. “Is that part of it?”

He nodded. “The change isn’t just in our saliva when we bite. It’s in our blood, our sex. It wants to be free.”

“Then do it all. Bite me. Fuck me. And I’ll…I’ll bite you back. I want it all.”

She smoothed her hands around his flanks. He shuddered and arched into her stroke, like some wild thing afraid but longing for her touch.

She gripped both sides of his T-shirt, and he ducked backward, turning the soft cotton inside out.

Turning her inside out. She gazed up at him, marveling at his sculpted chest, the hard planes peaked with dusky nipples and sloping down to lean ribs. The taut muscles of his abs arrowed down beneath his waistband, out of sight. The homeboys she ran with in Albuquerque were built. Tomas had been all into juicing—and not the nice kind with veggies either. But they were just a little soft around the middle, as if they could never quite be all the man they wanted to be.

But of course, they were just men.

And Blaze was more than that.

She traced her hands down his chest, lingering on the ink over his left pec. In the black tangle of curves and edges she could just make out the shape of the whirling wolf. Attacking? Dancing? She wasn’t sure.

Her hands drifted lower, to the fly of his jeans. “I want to see you,” she murmured. “All of you. The real you.”

He dropped his head, his hard breathing driving his belly into the back of her fingers. “Unbutton me and I’ll show you.”

She popped the button on his jeans and eased down the zipper.

The first dark curls appeared below his navel, but before she could unwrap the goods, longer black hair sprouted there. There and everywhere.

For a heartbeat, she was staring at Blaze as if through deep-flowing water.

Then the wolf stepped out of his jeans and straddled her.

Her breath caught hard in her chest, and her pulse echoed hollowly. Annie just gazed, rapt.

He was…oh man, he was a wolf.

A werewolf. It’s not that she hadn’t believed the whispers—sometimes whispers had a way of being more honest than shouts. But she hadn’t truly believed that she might possibly find a way out of her troubles.

Exhilaration rippled along her nerves, humming through her body, as if she was already changing, just like he had.

She buried her fingers in the thick ruff of fur around his neck. Heat poured off him, like the mirage of summer sun off a distant road. The hair was stiff and soft both. Dark at the roots, it spread in waves of ash and amber and purest white over his powerful body.

Across the side of the wolf’s face where the birthmark would have been was more plush fur with a cinnamon hue, and his eyes were the same blue-green but ringed in gold.

He was wild and gorgeous, and she wanted him—wanted to be him—so badly she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to let him go.

Gripping his ruff, she pulled herself half upright to bury her nose in the fur. She drew in a deep breath. In this shape, there was a musk to him, like a low-burning campfire. If only she could sit here all night, staring into him.

But she knew that wasn’t possible.

As if he heard the thought, he shifted again. She found herself holding tight to the shorter hair at his nape.

And he was naked.

Well, that did make things simpler.

She let go of his hair and, since she was already partly sitting up, she stripped her shirt over her head and flung it aside. Between the heat from his change and the fireplace, and her own excitement, she wasn’t going to be needing that anytime soon. And it was her good shirt.

“I don’t want to get blood on it,” she told him as she eased back to the cushions.

He was still crouched over her as he had been in his wolf shape, but now the gold ring around his eyes was thicker, eclipsing some of the blue-green, like a falling desert sun setting the pale evening sky aflame.

She sensed the wolf was still riding him hard. But now it was her turn. She skimmed one hand down his body to caress his heavy sac. She flicked her fingers forward to lightly stroke the ridge of his crown and the delicate, weeping slit. Glancing down at the thick, stiff erection jutting toward her, she let out a soft curse. The breath drifted between their bodies to tingle on her damp fingertips, and his cock bucked in her hand.

“Annie,” he said, his voice edged in a growl. “This is a no-take-backs kind of thing.”

Kicking off her sneakers, she said, “I’m counting on that.”

His hips pumped into her hand, and he closed his eyes. “God, I want…”

“So do I,” she whispered. “Do it.”

He dipped his head to breathe gustily against the side of her throat. When he set his teeth there, she stiffened, but he only scored her skin lightly over her raging pulse then sucked hard, hard enough she knew he’d leave a mark.

She wanted more than that.

She arched her back, offering him all she had. And she had a lot. He trailed hot kisses and a cool line of spit from the throb in her neck to the pounding beat over her heart. Her breasts felt swollen and tender, and when he thumbed open the front clasp of her bra, the twin mounds burst from their confines. The lacey edges scratched at her tight nipples.

She gasped at the sensation. Like the wolf he said wanted to be free, she didn’t want to hold anything back.

Squirming underneath him, she unfastened her jeans.

He growled, as if she might be trying to flee. Not a chance.

Her hips bumped upward against his bare cock, and they both froze.

“I’m clean,” he gasped, at the same moment, she blurted, “I have an IUD.”

They stared at each other for a long moment.

“I’m trying to turn into a movie monster so I can threaten my fuckhead ex with death by werewolf if he ever comes near me again,” she said. “You wouldn’t think I’d have to worry about the other stuff.”

“I’m a werewolf about to turn a reckless, pretty girl into a badder monster than her boyfriend,” he replied. “But I think there’s always other stuff to worry about.”

She twined one arm up around his neck. He thought she was pretty… He didn’t have to say that, considering she was already mostly naked. And if she was going to be reckless, she was going all the way. “Will you kiss me again?”

“All night.” He lowered himself until they were skin to skin except for her panties.

Mouth to mouth, they swapped breaths until they were both panting and her cleft was as wet and tingling as her lips. He skimmed her panties down and slicked his thumb over her clit, then found a rhythm of teasing circles that had her hips pumping in time.

He slipped a finger inside her at the same time he licked her nipple. She mewled and squirmed, but he didn’t let up, only switched his rasping tongue to her other breast until both nipples were engorged with blood and shiny red as holly berries.

If only he would bite her there…

“You’re so tight,” he murmured against her skin.

“I’m not a virgin, I promise.”

He huffed a laugh. “Me either. So why am I about to burst?”

“Not until you’re inside me.” She spread her legs and wrapped her heels behind his ass. “And then bite me.”

4

Blaze throttled a groan. If her touch didn’t kill him with pleasure, her words would. She was everything the wolf adored: bold and sensual. She went for what she wanted with all her curvy body and untamed soul.

And—how had he gotten so lucky?—what she wanted was him.

Was the wolf.

The thought crept up on him out of nowhere.

She’d come to Angels Rest looking for a werewolf—any werewolf. The fact she’d be coming under him was just dumb luck.

So which was he—lucky or dumb?

“Blaze?” she murmured.

It was the first time she’d said his name, and the sound seemed to reverberate in his bones. She must’ve heard it in the bar, but to know she’d been listening…

Maybe her choosing him wasn’t as random as it felt.

Maybe it was more like…like fate.

But that was impossible. This wasn’t the mating season. There was no chance of a true bond between them now, not in the depths of winter when the earth itself was all but dead.

His bite, his blood, his cum might do more than make her a werewolf.

It could make her his mate.

The wolf leaped for joy inside him. The rest of him suggested he should run screaming. He knew how this story ended, and it wasn’t happily.

But his cock was at the junction of her legs, and there was no force in the universe that would keep him from her.

His hips plunged down to bury himself at the same moment she reared up to kiss him. Their bodies and mouths came together in a brutal clash, and he tasted blood: hers, his, mixing.

She rocked her pelvis, taking him deeper, her knees splayed as wide as the big, old couch would allow. He pumped, slow and hard, grinding on her clit with each stroke, until she was writhing and panting.

“Oh please,” she moaned. “Please…”

Whether she was begging for him or for the chance of turning shifter, he wasn’t sure. Didn’t care at the moment because his balls were snugged tight to his body, his thigh muscles trembling with the urge to shoot his load.

But he gritted his teeth. He wouldn’t end till she did.

She bucked up under him with wordless little cries that he realized he was singing back to her, a desperate panting of aah and whining eee. Her name in his feral tongue.

“You took my kiss, my blood,” he growled. “You want my cum?”

“Yes, oh yes,” she keened. Her nails scratched down his back, and he slammed into her spread legs, the flesh of her thighs quaking like the aspens up in the mountains.

“I know you want it,” he gritted out. “I feel you squeezing me. I smell your juices. So, so sweet…”

Her inner muscles seized around him, and she bowed off the couch hard enough to boost him into the air. For a heartbeat he was flying, then his own orgasm surged through him.

He gushed into her body, the tremors within her milking him just as each slick pulse of his cock stroked her into another shiver of pleasure.

The aftershocks seemed to go on forever, and he didn’t even realize he’d collapsed on top of her, only barely not crushing her because the angle of the couch gave her a little room to breathe.

She was laughing, as much as she could with only a few inches of air.

He rolled one open eye down at her. “What?”

“I thought you were about to tell me to forget it, but then…” She clenched her pussy on him.

He groaned. “I’ll never forget this.”

Maybe literally never if she was his mate.

But she wasn’t a werewolf yet.

She tucked herself against him, seeming not to care that he was heavy. “How will I know if…”

For a second he wanted to pretend that he didn’t know what she was asking, that it wasn’t why they’d done this. But that wasn’t fair to her. “It’s different for everyone,” he said. “You might feel feverish at first.”

“I feel…” She rubbed her cheek against the wolf on his chest. “Grrrreat.” Then she looked up at him and smiled. She cupped her hand against his jaw. “Thank you for the perfect Christmas gift.”

“We don’t know for sure if…if it worked.”

“No takebacks, you said, remember?” She grinned. “No gift return receipts.”

He remembered. And that should make him feel better.

But it didn’t, even though his cock was still swollen tight inside her.

The port wine stain under her fingertips throbbed a sinister counterpoint.

The pack had been in trouble lately. The Kingdom Guard—a clandestine paramilitary organization of humans who hunted shapeshifters—had tried repeatedly to take out the Villalobos cousins who guided the pack. All the shifters in the Four Corners region knew they needed to close ranks, keep up a strong, united, and circumspect front.

And Blaze knew better than most how a shifter initiation could go very wrong. But despite that, he’d just taken a human girl with vengeance on her mind.

Not on her mind at this very moment, though, apparently, because her smile turned wicked.

“If you’re not sure I’m going to become a werewolf, maybe we’d better try again. Just to be on the safe side.”

There was no safe side for a werewolf. But when she crooked her finger, his wolf was only too ready to follow wherever she led. Even into danger.

Annie wasn’t sure what time they fell asleep, but she didn’t think she’d ever had a pillow as comfortable as Blaze’s shoulder.

When she woke up, though, she had a crick in her neck and he was gone.

They’d moved to the bedroom before their second round, and the blankets were in a terrible twist. Her cheeks burned with the memory of how they’d gotten that way.

Had she really made him bite her nipple hard enough to bleed? She touched herself through the wrinkled sheet and winced.

Yup. She had.

Luckily there was a connecting door from the bedroom to the bathroom and they’d dragged their clothes with them last night. She whisked into the shower, got cleaned up and dressed, and headed into the living room without seeing if anyone was there.

She needn’t have worried though. The trailer was empty.

She pursed her lips to stop herself from scowling. She’d asked for a werewolf, not a boyfriend. After Tomas, she might never want another boyfriend. Besides, werewolves probably didn’t leave notes; they’d, like, pee on the bedpost or something.

Thinking of what he’d said about smelling her made her blush again. If other werewolves used this place…

She used up her nervous energy on spray bleach and fabric softener. When the laundered sheets were back on the bed—tight enough to bounce a quarter, just as she’d been taught—she went to the bathroom again to stare at herself in the mirror.

The fog from her shower had cleared, but the glass still seemed a little hazy. Just old, she supposed.

Or maybe she couldn’t quite see what came next.

Once she’d heard about werewolves, getting turned had been her focus. But now she was bitten—and fucked—so…

She pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, wondering if she’d feel the fever. But she seemed much the same as always.

She’d noticed the old-fashioned rotary dial phone on the divider between the living room and kitchen so she went to check it out. To her surprise, there was a tone when she picked up the handset.

The dial felt heavy and strange under her fingertip.

“Hello? Who’s this?” The query wavered anxiously.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Annie Belle! Where are you?”

“Away for a bit,” Annie said evasively. “Is everything okay there?” It was never okay-okay, but they had their own version of okay.

“It’s fine.” Meaning no one was in the hospital, no one needed bonded out. Her mother’s voice dropped to a whisper. “But he came by tonight, asking if I seen you.”

No need to ask who. “Tell him…I’m staying with friends.”

“He gonna say you got no friends but his.”

For a woman who knew men so well, her mother had always chosen poorly. Annie wished she hadn’t inherited that particular trait along with the flyaway blond hair.

“If Tomas or his boys come round again, don’t you open the door,” she said sternly. “But tell him I’ll come see him soon as I’m back in town.”

Her ex didn’t need to know that was a threat. Not that he’d believe it even if she spat it in his face. He wouldn’t even accept that he was her ex, even though her statement—signed in blood and her broken bones—had put him away. But not for long enough.

Once in, always in, Tomas had told her.

Which was sort of like what Blaze had said about werewolves…

The similarity made her gut clench.

But it was too late, she reminded herself. What was done was done. Maybe. Unless the bite and sex hadn’t taken, in which case…

Well, she’d just have to find Blaze for another round.

In the meantime, she’d take care of her churning belly with some breakfast. Then she’d go over to the roadhouse and earn her keep. With tips, she could make enough to tide her over until she was sure she was a werewolf. She’d hold back some for bus fare.

Although once she was a werewolf, she wouldn’t worry so much about hitchhiking. She wouldn’t worry so much about anything. Anticipation made her skin itch. She couldn’t wait.

She definitely needed to see Blaze later.

If anything could make her feverish, it was him.

5

Blaze couldn’t take the shortcut up to Mesa Diablo. That route required four legs and zero fear of heights. But he needed to face his alpha with his spine upright and his pants on to plead his guilt.

Though he was guilty mostly of taking his pants off.

So he borrowed Sanchez’s muscle car in return for topping off the gas tank and drove the highway through Angels Rest out to the switchback gravel road leading up the mesa. Where the gravel stopped, he parked. In better weather, hikers and hunters left their vehicles here, but there were never very many of them. In the thin light of December with shredded shrouds of cloud obscuring the low sun, the mesa seemed even more forsaken.

Or maybe that was just his mood.

Instead of walking out to the basalt spires etched with ancient petroglyphs that told the story of shape-changing devils in the mountains, Blaze followed a scent trail that only a werewolf would find and dove into the ponderosa forest.

Where the trees ended, a stately lodge appeared. The Villalobos house was the spiritual center of the pack even though most of the wolves ranged through the canyons and plateaus for a hundred miles in any direction.

Blaze had been there only twice. The first he didn’t remember: his father had brought him when he was a newborn pup to mark his place in the pack. The second was when he’d hit puberty; that time, proving mastery of his wolf had earned him the sigil inked over his heart.

His father had already been gone at that point, and he’d be lucky if Kane Villalobos didn’t carve out the tattoo with a spoon as punishment for letting the wolf’s instinct trump common sense.

Deep inside, the wolf sneezed at him in mockery.

Yeah well, the wolf wasn’t standing here now, was it?

Blaze walked up to the double doors. In the keystone position at the top of the masonry arch was a rock etched with a secret petroglyph.

The wolf sigil carved in the stone would shine only in the light of the full moon of the spring mating season. But as he stared up, he almost swore he saw a glimmer in the rock.

When he let out a whispered curse, his breath fogged the cold air. Was it just an icy patch on the stone that caught his eye? He strode through the cloud of his own making, swatting at the infinitesimal floating crystals.

Before he could take a second look, the front doors opened.

The overwhelming stink of cinnamon cloves poured out, almost thick enough to materialize as his breath had done. Both he and the wolf sneezed.

“I know, I know.” A female stood in the opening, her red hair askew on top of her head. “Too much. But I wanted it to be Christmas-y.”

A second, tawny-haired female joined her. “Now all Four Corners can smell it’s Christmas.” She grinned at Blaze. “You probably don’t want to come in.”

He definitely didn’t want to, but the potpourri stench was the least of his reasons.

He recognized both females though he’d seen them only from a distance. He didn’t need to see them; like all the pack, he’d felt the moment when their bonds tightened on their powerful mates.

The smiling one was Maddie, true mate of the pack’s alpha, Kane. The scowling redhead was Darling, mated to Rafael Villalobos, Kane’s cousin and second in command.

Mad and Dare. Both women had become werewolves during the most recent mating season. Before that, neither had had any idea that werewolves existed.

If there were any beings Blaze wanted to confess his biting and fucking to less than his alpha, it was his alpha’s sharp-eyed mate and her best friend.

But they had gone through what Annie was facing. He shifted uncertainly from one foot to the other.

“Blaze Domingo,” Maddie said at last. “Tried to swing by your mom’s place last month. She’s still out on Thorn Gully Road, right? The gate was closed, and it seemed rude to go around. How’s your brother doing in graduate school?”

“Uh, good. He’s home for the winter break, but he’ll be the first in the family to finish a degree, so Mom’s proud of him.” The port wine stain felt fiery hot. “And yeah, she still lives out there. But she…doesn’t really appreciate folks stopping by.”

“Folks,” Maddie repeated softly. “Meaning werewolves.”

He clenched one fist hard enough to crack his knuckles. Of course Maddie knew everything about him already. She was his alpha’s mate, and she was a strong werewolf in her own right. She would do whatever was necessary to fortify her position, her mate’s, and the pack’s.

Just as well he was coming clean now.

Except he really wished he’d stayed with Annie long enough to shower.

Especially when he saw Dare’s nostrils flare. Her wolf wasn’t as dominant as her friend’s, but in some ways it was more observant. He could almost imagine creamy furred ears the same color as her pale skin perking through her red hair.

He took a slow breath. “That’s old news. And I have something else to talk about.”

Maddie’s smile vanished instantly.

Dare straightened another inch. “Should I get Kane?”

Maddie studied Blaze for a moment then nodded, and Dare vanished into the house’s dark interior.

She tilted her head. “Anything you want to say before they come back?”

He considered. “Whatever happens, don’t—please don’t take it out on her.”

Maddie didn’t ask “she who?” and didn’t say anything else until her mate returned alone. The two of them stepped out under the petroglyph and let the doors swing silently shut behind them. The reek of excessive holiday cheer thinned but didn’t quite disappear.

Kane Villalobos waited with the centered stance of his army days. He’d traveled the world making connections with other shifters before returning to Angels Rest, and Blaze was painfully aware of the gulf of experience between them. His wolf only knew that Kane’s wolf was a giant brindled beast that could pancake him—in either shape—with three paws tied behind its back.

Blaze faced his alphas and told them about the previous night.

Not all of it, of course. Not the softness of Annie’s skin, not her sweetness when she cried out. And not his burning need to see her again.

He ended with, “She wants a wolf to protect herself. She’s not some Kingdom Guard spy.”

“How nice you’re such an expert on spying,” Kane said wryly.

Blaze flushed. When he’d been watching Annie from the shadows last night, he hadn’t even thought to stop himself from going to her when she dropped the key.

And at that point, they’d even both still had on all their clothes.

Maddie gave her mate a nudge with her elbow. “Gypsy and her brother didn’t come up with any Guard connection either.”

Blaze jolted, then smacked his fist into his thigh. After the Kingdom Guard attacks, of course Gypsy would’ve reached out to the pack alpha about a stranger in town.

“Annie is just trying to survive,” he repeated. Shapeshifters knew all about the struggles of survival, so maybe that would convince the Villalobos to spare her. He remembered days and nights when he felt his wolf was the only one who cared what happened to him. That loneliness, as much as Annie’s sexy, straight-on gaze when she said “bite me”, had moved him to grant her wish.

Kane skewered him with a formidable alpha stare. “You might be saving her at the risk of everything else we have here. Maybe she’s not Kingdom Guard, but how did she know about us?”

When Blaze could only shrug, Maddie let out a thoughtful hum. “Maybe she can help us with that answer. Tracking rumors is harder than tracking rabbits.”

The wolf in Blaze stiffened. It wasn’t ready to share its Ahh-eee.

Another glint from the petroglyph caught his eye, and he scowled. Was the damn rock mocking him?

Maddie followed his shift of attention. “If the werewolf virus is in Annie already, then the hows and what-ifs don’t matter. She needs to stay until her transformation. Gypsy will keep a watch when the moon is up. And Blaze too. After that…” The jagged edge in her agate-colored eyes softened when she looked at him. “You know she’ll have to choose.”

He knew that—better than any of them. But hadn’t she already chosen when she asked to see him, all of him?

He didn’t want to continue that thought.

Because what if all of him wasn’t enough?

6

Annie knew she was being watched. Not just by Gypsy, who had set her to updating the inventory of booze and dry goods, but by the others who drifted into the bar because they “just needed to ask a question” or “just wanted a cup of coffee”. Who drank roadhouse coffee anytime that wasn’t 3 a.m.?

A bouncy redhead in a puffy jacket blew in late in the afternoon and threw herself onto a bar stool just one down from where Annie was tallying up her last lists.

“Hey, Dare,” Gypsy said. “Getcha coffee?”

“I love you, lady, but your coffee is worse than Angel Creek runoff after a cattle drive.”

Gypsy snorted. “What do you want then?”

“A cup of tea, I suppose. And to interrogate your new waitress.” She turned toward Annie.

Who’d been listening, of course, but pretending not to. She stiffened when the redhead focused on her. She hadn’t expected anyone to admit their curiosity.

She eyed the redhead warily. “Interrogate? There won’t be, like, waterboarding or anything, I hope.”

The woman—Dare didn’t seem that much older than Annie was, though the flowers appliquéd on her jeans made her look harmlessly young—flashed a sly grin. “Maybe just sleep deprivation.”

Considering she’d yawned more than a few times during the day, Annie couldn’t stop herself from blushing. While she’d been busting her ass in the bar, apparently Blaze had been out kissing and telling.

“What do you want to know?” she asked stiffly as Gypsy slid a steaming mug across the bar and then made herself scarce in the back room.

“Blaze said you were in trouble and you think the wolf can get you out.”

A zing of interest made Annie swivel toward the other woman. Was Dare a werewolf too? She didn’t look like a monster; she looked more like a pinup model. “My ex always liked to celebrate by drinking. And then smacking me. Since Tomas just got early release from prison for ‘good behavior’, I’m thinking he’s going to be particularly celebratory on my ass.”

Dare studied her. “That’s tough.”

Annie lifted her chin. “It’s going to be really tough for him when I’m a werewolf.”

She half expected the soft, pretty woman to give her some blowback about turning the other cheek. But Dare nodded. “I bit most of the way through a guy’s hand once. It was nasty.” She took a long drink of her tea as if to wash out the remembered taste.

Picturing the stylish Dare as a ravening wolf left Annie blinking. “I sort of thought just showing him would be enough.”

“Maybe. But a wolf isn’t a pet on a leash.”

Annie scowled. “This seems less like an interrogation and more like a lecture. I got plenty of those from the public defender and the social worker and the parole officer and the ER doc who set my bones last Christmas. See, I’m the one who put Tomas away.”

“Good for you.”

Annie snorted. “Whatever. The first thing he did when he found out he was getting out?” She tucked her hair behind her ear and angled her bruised cheek toward the light from the window. “Sent one of his boys round to give me this. Said it was a ‘missed-you kiss’ from Tomas and there were a lot more coming.” All the bottles in Gypsy’s wouldn’t be enough to drown the sickness that had flooded her mouth with bile when he sneered at her, both of them knowing there was nothing she could do. “As a werewolf, I’ll be stronger than him, than all of them.”

“Not a werewolf yet,” Dare reminded her. “You willing to hear one more lecture?”

Annie shrugged.

“You came here looking for a werewolf, but what else did you find?”

Oh sure, now she switched back to asking questions. Annie stuffed down her impatience and tried to consider the little riddle. Well, she’d found Blaze, of course. But he was the werewolf. Was she supposed to think he was something else?

Annie waited, but the other woman drained her mug and hopped off the barstool.

“Don’t forget those cute Christmas cocktail recipes I emailed you,” Dare hollered abruptly. “Angels Rest needs more cute cocktails.”

From the back room, Gypsy grunted something mostly indecipherable.

But Dare grinned as if she’d heard every word. She waved at Annie. “Gotta go. If you need anything or have questions…” She left the sentence dangling.

Questions like what else she was supposed to be looking for in this backwater town, maybe? It was Christmas time; gifts were supposed to be right under the tree and easy to find, not something she had to hunt down.

Annie just shook her head.

Dare reached the bar’s front door as it opened, letting in a gust of cold and the gray light that heralded another snow flurry. She ducked under the arm of the guy arriving in the doorway.

Blaze lifted his chin from the sheepskin ruff of his heavy chore coat and stiffened. His wary gaze followed Dare out before turning to track instantly to Annie.

Her pulse leaped when their gazes connected.

She throttled the reaction. She’d already gotten what she wanted from him—hopefully—and she reminded herself she was annoyed that he’d tattled on them. But she couldn’t shut down her awareness of Blaze’s slow steps across the bar. The scent of pine and snow drifted to her a moment before he did. She knew he was carrying the cold of the outdoors with him. But her blood was running so hot she wondered if anyone else could see the steam between them.

He paused in front of her, and she had to look up.

“Hey,” he said.

She bit the inside of her cheek. The faint tang of blood reminded her of what they’d shared.

Her lashes fluttered against her will. Damn it. She didn’t want to be one of those girls, turning all weak and giggly when a hot, ripped guy walked by. She’d seen too often what happened to those girls; she’d been one of them. Instead of taking what she wanted, she gave up who she was.

Never again. She’d taken Blaze, and she had his wolf. It was her wolf now. Or would be, if she could just be sure it was in her.

If only she could trigger the fever. Right. Now.

She stared up at him through her suddenly not-fluttering lashes.

“Hey,” she said back.

Apparently werewolves weren’t much for small talk.

He jerked his thumb over his shoulder toward the door then hooked it in his belt loop. “So Dare was here.”

“Yeah.” Annie thought about relaying their conversation, but what did it even mean—what else did you find? What else was there to find in this little town with barely one main street? “It was fine.” But unlike when she and her mother used the word, this time it pretty much had been fine.

Blaze grimaced as if he heard the things she didn’t say. “I’m sorry they butted in. I had to tell them. When you change, I didn’t want them thinking you were a rogue.”

She tilted her head. “A rogue?” That actually sounded sort of cool.

“A werewolf who can’t control the wolf.”

Okay, not cool. She had enough destructive forces in her life. Nobody needed more of that.

“Speaking of which.” His edgy movements stilled for the first time since he’d walked in. His blue-green eyes were steady on her. “How are you doing?”

“Fine,” she said again. And again she was surprised she meant it. She knew her curt answers were bugging him by the way his eyes narrowed, and she didn’t want that—at least not anymore—so she added, “I missed you this morning.”

She half thought that might scare him off again. After all, he hadn’t been there when she woke up.

Instead, he brushed the back of his knuckles over her cheek. Not the bruised one.

“I followed you from the bar last night,” he said. “And then I was watching you sleep. Started to feel a little weird about it.”

Whatever he’d felt had been strong enough to scare him, even if he wasn’t running now. She wasn’t sure what to make of that. She quirked a smile at him. “I think it’s only stalking if I’m not a werewolf too.”

As he dropped his hand, his gaze drifted down to her mouth. “I think you are. There’s just something… When I look at you, it’s like I hear someone singing, far away.”

Under his stare, her lips tingled as if a ghost was kissing her. “I’m a terrible singer,” she warned. “Makes my little sisters laugh like crazy.”

“Wolves hate auto-tune. You should hear the pack when we’re all together at the summer solstice. We want everyone to hit a different note.”

She laughed. “I can hit the wrong notes for sure.”

“Perfect.”

They grinned at each other. Until she remembered she wasn’t a werewolf yet, even if Blaze thought he heard the wolf in her.

And she wouldn’t be there for the summer solstice anyway.

The heavy beat of her heart felt too slow, but she needed the fever.

She reached across the space between them and tangled her fingers through his. “You should come over to the trailer. I stopped by a place in town this morning called Grampa’s and got some sandwiches.”

Blaze widened his eyes. “If you stopped by Grampa’s, I hope you went across the street to Gramma’s too. If you only buy from one, they get pissed.”

Annie shook her head in exaggerated dismay. “Gypsy warned me. I got chocolate chip cookies at Gramma’s.”

“War averted.”

How nice to live in a place where peace was that easy, just a matter of balancing receipts. Well, she wasn’t interested in a tie with Tomas, even if her mother was always telling her and her sisters to play fair—nope, she was going to nuke Tomas from her werewolf orbit.

Just as soon as she was a werewolf.

“So,” she said to Blaze. “You hungry?”

The golden ring around his blue-green eyes glinted when he nodded.

She excused herself to Gypsy who waved her off with thanks.

Though it was just late afternoon, the sun had already disappeared behind the clouds that seemed almost low enough to touch the mesa. When they stepped out of the roadhouse, Blaze put his coat over her shoulders. The thick canvas enveloped her with his warmth and scent, as if he had wrapped his arms around her.

“It’s not that far to the trailer,” she objected, but she snuggled her face into the fuzzy collar when the wind nipped at her nose.

“Your coat is too thin for out here.”

She bristled a little. “It’s good enough for Albuquerque, usually. I don’t hang outside in the winter much.”

“Werewolves do.”

Oh. Right. She said nothing as they followed the gravel path around the back of the roadhouse to the single-wide.

He must have sensed her sudden deflation because he added, “At least it has snaps. Snaps are better than zippers. If you have to change fast, zippers are hard to work with your teeth.”

So much she hadn’t considered about this new life. The werewolf woman Dare had offered to explain things, but Annie didn’t even know what questions to ask.

At least the change came with its own fur coat, no zippers or snaps.

Annie waited while Blaze crouched to retrieve the key from under the lawn gnome then slipped past him when he held the door for her as if they were entering a fine dining establishment.

So sweet.

So sexy.

She waited just long enough for him to close the door then she jumped him.

Eyes glittering, almost half gold, he let her press him up against the door. “That kind of hungry, hmm?”

She grinned up at him. “Is it obvious?”

“As of right this second, yeah, very.”

Fisting her hands in the front of his T-shirt, she pushed up on her toes and surfed the hard muscles of his chest to kiss him.

He was enough taller than her that he still had to dip his head to take her mouth. With an under-her-breath growl, she slid her hands up to lock behind his head.

He gave her an answering growl and anchored his hands under her ass to haul her all the way up. So much better. The swell behind his fly nudged her belly, setting butterflies dancing from there all the way down to her tiptoes and all the way up to her nipples chafing against the inside of her bra.

She slanted her mouth across his and darted her tongue between his teeth when he parted his lips with a sound that was much less growl and much more groan.

His fingers dug into the flesh of her backside, hard enough to leave a mark, and she whimpered.

Instantly, he loosened his grip with a murmur of dismay.

“Again,” she whispered against his mouth.

He hesitated only a second before hauling her even closer, tighter. Her breath caught in little sobs of wanting, and she rubbed her mound against him.

“So hot.” He ground upward into her. “So needy.”

Yeah, she needed this. She squirmed, and when he didn’t let her down fast enough, she slipped through the confines of his coat and went to her knees in front of him.

She flicked open the top button of his fly and feathered her fingertips along the upper rim of his waistband until he sucked in his breath, the muscles in his abs tensing. “I believe you said zippers are too hard for teeth?”

He dropped the empty coat to the floor. “Annie…”

At least that’s what she thought he was trying to say. But the sound came out mostly as one long moan. His hands clenched and released in her hair, as if he wasn’t sure whether to hold her there or push her back.

She tongued up the zipper tab and caught it between her teeth with a little click.

He stared down at her, his eyes streaked with gold all the way through. The sharp edges of his cheekbones burned with his aroused blood, blending with the birthmark.

With exquisite care, she eased the zipper down, hissing out a long, hot breath over the dark curls of his pubes.

She only got about halfway down before his cock came surging out to meet her. Kind of dangerous since the zipper teeth were still right there. She guarded the satiny flesh with her hand as she flayed open the denim panels to reveal him in all his glory.

She already knew he was straight as a pool stick and thick as a beer bottle, but holding him made her pussy clench with the excitement of having him again.

Well, her pussy would have to wait.

She gave him a lollipop lick, and his head slammed back into the door behind him. She hummed a laugh low in her throat while licking him again, and his body bowed toward her, quivering.

Time to get serious.

7

She was seriously going to make him come.

Blaze couldn’t hold back his animal rumbles of pleasure as she lapped and sucked him from base to slit and back again. Though the cheap trailer door was chilly against his spine, her mouth was hot as the summer sand after skinny-dipping in Angel Creek. She traced each bulging vein, and her gusting breath fanned the shadow flames of lust racing backward from his cock. His balls were tucked up inside his jeans so hard and tight they’d probably fit in the damn coin pocket.

He bucked his hips helplessly, and she gulped him. He’d never, ever…

“I’m going to come,” he warned with a gasp. He set his hands on her shoulders to nudge her away.

But she tilted her head back to look up at him through the tangle of her blond hair, and his erection surged smoothly down her throat. He let out a low, heartfelt moan.

Though the trailer’s thin curtains blocked most of the winter evening, her dark eyes gleamed with hunter’s light. The glimmer of red in the depths shocked him.

The wolf fever.

If she started to change and panicked, she might bite his dick right off.

But for deep throating, it was a risk he’d just have to take.

“Last chance,” he gritted out.

She growled back, and he came.

With each pulse of his orgasm, he panted her name, until the last iteration was little more than a whisper.

Her growl also softened to a rough breath that vibrated through his cock.

She was choking but not willing to back down. Gently, he withdrew, another pulse going through him at the sight of his slicked flesh easing from between her reddened lips.

“God, you’re beautiful,” he murmured as he traced one fingertip over her ear to tuck back her mussed hair.

Still on her knees, she tilted her head into his palm and half closed her eyes, the wolf fever banked for the moment. “You taste like tamarisk honey.”

“I work on an arbor crew and we were out in the canyons cutting salt cedar today. That’s why I left so early this morning. But I had to take a break and go beat off from thinking of you.”

Her slightly swollen lips parted with a pleased smile. “I hope you didn’t get caught.”

His cock jerked, and he grunted.

Her smile turned sly. “You like that idea?”

“I don’t share,” he growled.

“Maybe you’d like to watch me—” She let out a little yelp when he reached down to haul her to her feet.

He spun her around and put her back against the door, right where he’d been. He braced his forearms on either side of her head and leaned in close.

“I guess I’ll have to watch you real close.”

She canted her head, lashes flickering over her dark eyes that glinted again, but not with the wolf fever, just a sensual challenge. “Maybe I like to get caught.”

“Then I’ll catch you.” He snaked his head down to kiss her.

She flicked her tongue against his, and he tasted a hint of the sweet-dark honey, thick as molasses, that bees crafted from the tamarisk.

Still pinning her against the door, he reached for the button of her jeans.

She blinked at him. “But aren’t you…”

“Here’s a thing about werewolves,” he said. “We can go all night. And we can go…all…night.” With each word, he kissed her and shoved her jeans farther down.

She kicked off her sneakers, jeans, and panties like a cat shaking water off its paws, bumping his stiff cock with each thrust. On the last shake, she tucked him between her legs.

He groaned as his dick slicked through her wet cleft. “Did you come when you sucked me?”

“Almost.” Her cheeks turned pink. “I felt…I almost felt like I was licking myself.”

To the beast, one with its surroundings, every sensation, every movement, every encounter was a call and response of self and other, an endless circle that even death didn’t break, a unity.

A mating.

But they couldn’t be mated. Not at midwinter. He hadn’t even seen the moon through the clouds in weeks.

His pulse stuttered and sped, but his cock stayed rock hard, thrusting up into her pussy like a bee delving for nectar.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes, her core clenching hot and wet around him. He set his teeth to the side of her neck and nipped her. Her mewl of dark pleasure spiked through him, and his erection swelled even more. With each pump of his hips, her ass thumped against the door—honey, I’m home.

“Oh god, you’re so deep,” she said. “I feel you in my heart.”

It couldn’t be, but it was. They were bonding. Her wolf hadn’t even risen yet. They’d made each other no promises. He didn’t know her last name.

And none of that mattered.

“I’m coming,” she whined. “Don’t stop. Oh, don’t stop.”

He clenched his jaw and tightened his thighs, holding her fast even as he pounded her into her shuddering climax. His head whirled with the scent of winter jasmine, too delicate for the desert, but here nonetheless.

“Oh yes, yes, yes,” she cried.

But would she still say that when she discovered she was mated to him?

She’d never showered with anyone else, but Annie decided she could get used to sharing the hot water if it meant she had someone to massage her scalp and shoulders.

Well, not just someone…

Blaze.

How could he be so sexy-rough—pounding her against a single-wide door, for god’s sake; they could’ve broken right through and ended up humping in the backyard of a roadhouse—but then take the borrowed comb out of her hand and tease out the knots himself?

Maybe it was because he was a werewolf: part man, part beast.

And it was the beast who was sweetest.

After they toweled each other off, she grimaced at her clothes. They’d been with her since Albuquerque and had seen better days even before that.

Blaze must’ve caught her expression. He took her hand and pulled her out to the bedroom then threw open the accordion closet doors.

She eyed the selection. “Whose are these?”

“Whoever needs them.” He winked at her. “Shapeshifters sometimes have trouble remembering where they left their clothes. And that’s when they aren’t drinking.”

She snorted and flicked through the hangers. “Lot of pearl snaps.”

“I think I could maybe try a zipper,” he said solemnly.

She pulled down a long-sleeve western shirt and towel-flicked it at him. He twisted easily out of the way, grinning.

The clothes were all men’s fashion—seriously, even in the werewolf world she bet only males forgot where they put their clothes—but besides the shirt, she found denim in a smaller size that fit her well enough to be almost cute boyfriend jeans and were actually nicer than her own pair. The socks were all too big, but considering the cold and the thin soles of her sneakers, she didn’t mind the extra bulk.

“No underwear,” she said.

“Too bad, so sad,” Blaze said, not even trying to sound sincere.

She chased him out of the bedroom—since males didn’t care about being buck-ass naked, apparently—and got dressed.

But when she emerged, tying the two edges of the button shirt around her midriff, he too was clothed.

“I don’t think this outfit is going to get me as many tips tonight,” she said, looking down at the heather cotton.

Blaze ambled toward her and pulled her into his arms. “Here’s a tip: your smile is worth all my money.”

Even while she rolled her eyes, she slipped her arms around him and ducked her hands into the rear pockets of his jeans to squeeze his butt. She pursed her lips in mock disappointment. “Not much back here. In money or meat. Somebody should feed you.”

“You tricked me with the promise of cookies and then put me to work,” he complained. “Which reminds me. You gotta take it easy at Gypsy’s tonight.”

She scowled at him and tugged her hands back. “Oh yeah? Says who?”

He caught her fists before she could pull away. “Feel that? That’s the wild animal in you.”

“No, that’s the mean bitch in me who comes out when people try to tell me what to do.”

“Isn’t that what I just said?” He smirked and reeled her closer when she squirmed against his hold. “The moon is rising,” he continued, “and it’s calling to the wolf.”

Her wolf.

She let out a slow breath and her spine wilted a little. “Oh.”

“Yeah. It’s better for you—and for everyone else—if the beast can emerge in its own way, in its own time. That’s all that matters for now.”

She nibbled at her lip. “Can I do anything to hurry it along?”

“Can you hurry the springtime?”

“Maybe if I growled a little more?” She hoped he knew that was sort of an apology. She didn’t want to be a bitch; Tomas would’ve wiped the floor with her.

“Maybe.” Blaze kissed her forehead, so she thought he did know. “Are you hungry for real this time?” When she nodded against his lips, he spun her toward the kitchen. “Then go make me a sandwich.”

She wriggled out of his grasp and glowered at him. “Seriously?”

“Nah. I’ll do it.”

While he arranged the Grampa’s sandwiches neatly on matching plates, she sat at the Formica counter with her oversized-stockinged feet propped on the stool cushion, her chin on her knees, admiring his lean, strong beauty. Except for that one pool shot he’d missed, he always moved as if his body was his to command. Her mood swung again when she remembered last Christmas sprawling at Tomas’ boots, unable to rise, her ribs grinding with every awkward breath.

Never again.

When Blaze placed the triangular wedges of sandwich in front of her, she asked, “What was the best part of becoming a werewolf for you?”

His eyebrows shot up then plunged as he settled onto the stool beside her. “I’ve never thought about it. I was born this way.”

She pursed her lips. “So your parents are both werewolves? And they raised you always knowing what you were? But what if you did think about it?”

He spun his plate in front of him. “I don’t know.” He stared down, but she wondered what he was really seeing. “It’s all fine, I guess.”

Fine. She knew how many ways to interpret that. “Did you ever want to be just human?”

“No.” He was silent for a long moment. “My mother was human, didn’t know anything about shapeshifters until my father mated her.” His shoulders rounded. “She…she didn’t choose it.”

Annie jerked, and her socks slid off the stool. “He forced her?” An ugly chill creeped through the borrowed clothes.

“Most werewolf pups are male. I have a brother, and every shapeshifter couple I know in Angels Rest has boys. Any werewolf male who wants a mate has to find a human woman who can accept the change.”

“But your mom didn’t accept it,” Annie noted. “You’re saying she was raped.” When Blaze didn’t respond, she thought of the bubbly Dare who had offered to answer all her questions. No way had anyone ever hurt her. “I can’t believe it.”

Blaze pushed aside his plate. “She loved my dad, wanted to marry him. But she didn’t know that meant taking the wolf too. Until it was too late. That doesn’t happen anymore. Our pack alpha outlawed forced conversions.”

The bruise on her face that she’d almost forgotten about throbbed in sympathy with those women who’d come before her.

It was one thing to choose to become a monster… But had she really chosen this? Or had Tomas forced her too?

She clutched the unknown shapeshifter’s shirt tight around her belly. “How did your mom get over it? Did she…forgive him? I mean…you’re here, and your brother too…”

“We’re twins, born from the first mating season when he took her. She did her best, but sometimes she couldn’t even stand to look at us.” His voice cracked, taking Annie’s heart with it. She leaned across the space between them to put her head on his shoulder.

He buried his face in her hair, his voice still rough but muffled. “They fought one night—well, they fought a lot, but it was Christmas Eve and I was hiding in the downstairs closet, waiting for Santa Claus, so I heard it all. She told him the only gift she wanted was to get rid of the wolf. When my brother woke up, Dad was gone.”

“Oh, Blaze,” she whispered. And she’d thought her last Christmas in the ER had been shitty. “Why do these things always happen at the holidays?”

“So we appreciate the every days more?” He let out a gusty sigh. “I know what he did was wrong. The way things were done, maybe, but wrong. But…he was great with me and my brother. He took us running in the hills, taught us how to be wolves. And men, when we needed to be.” He rubbed his cheek against her hair, and she wondered if he was wiping away a tear. “It doesn’t mean much to you because you don’t know our ways, but werewolves don’t just leave their pack. They don’t leave their mates and their pups behind. He left when he wanted to stay, and my mother stayed but she wanted to leave.”

Blaze lifted his head. The gold ring was nowhere in his eyes, and the birthmark burned on his blanched cheek. “I swore I’d never do what they did. I’d rather be alone than mated to someone who didn’t want me.”

She wanted to tell him he wouldn’t be alone, but she knew he wouldn’t believe her. And why should he? They both knew that alone was the default setting in the universe. She sagged back on her stool. “I’m sorry,” she said. Because, really, what else was there to say?

Until she had a werewolf to back up her big, bad words? Nothing at all.

8

They finished their meal in silence, and Blaze regretted telling Annie the story about hiding in the closet. That Christmas was over and gone.

He just wished this holiday could be different.

But as the daylight faded into a flurry of snow and they tidied up the trailer in preparation for Annie’s happy hour shift at the roadhouse, he felt their interlude of playing house was coming to an end. And when he locked the front door and hid the key, the thud of the lawn gnome on the frozen earth had a bleak finality.

They walked over to Gypsy’s, their heads ducked against the wannabe storm. Before he could open the door for her, Annie put her hand on his elbow, bringing him to a reluctant halt.

“You were right when you said I don’t know your ways. I didn’t even believe in werewolves until you changed for me.”

He narrowed his eyes. “You said you already knew and you told me not to lie to you.”

“I was desperate and looking for a miracle.”

“A Christmas miracle.” He couldn’t hide the bitterness in his voice. “From a monster.”

“And you gave me one.”

He shook his head. “We don’t even know for sure if the virus was transmitted.”

“The virus wasn’t the miracle.” She trailed her hand down his arm and burrowed her fingers into his tight fist. “You’ve made me believe in good guys. You were willing to save me.”

“By biting you. By fu—”

She placed one fingertip over his lips. “By caring.” She raised their joined hands to her bruised cheek and pressed his knuckles over the faded mark. “Despite what happened to you back then, you were willing to take a chance on me now. And I can’t tell you what that means to me.”

He tilted his forehead down to lean against hers. “You don’t have to say it.”

They stood there a long moment until the jukebox inside fired up.

“I want a hometown Christmas.

I want a country Christmas.

Let’s make it the merriest Christmas this year.”

They went inside, and Gypsy immediately summoned Annie behind the bar. Blaze found a corner table where he could watch her. Each hour that passed without her wolf rising meant she was less likely to make the change.

He was too confused to even know how he should feel about that.

Before he could ask for a coke to drown his sorrows, long arms wrapped around him from behind.

He grunted, reached behind him, grabbed his attacker in a headlock, and noogied him.

His brother squawked—an embarrassing noise for a werewolf—and swatted at him to get free. “Dude, you’re messing up my hair gel.”

Blaze let him loose. “You look like a conceited lion shifter, bro,” Blaze said. “And that’s the ugliest sweater I’ve ever seen.”

“Isn’t it awesome?” Easton stretched out the front to better show off the rabid-looking reindeer chomping off the heads of gingerbread men. Glittery threads spilled out of the scalloped wounds and spelled out the words Eat Me. “Mom made it for me.” He shook his head. “Hard to believe, right? She said she found the pattern online and added a few touches.”

Blaze wasn’t sure he wanted to know which touches belonged to his shifter-hating mother.

Easton snagged the beer bottle he’d left on the window ledge and pulled another stool up to the table. “So who is she?” When Blaze only gave him a long stare, he jerked his chin at Annie. “If she’s fair game—”

“She’s not,” Blaze snarled.

“Ah, shifter passion. The gift that keeps on giving.”

“I hope our parents aren’t paying too much for that college education, because it’s not making you any smarter.”

“I go because the only thing that keeps our mother sane and alive is believing that at least one of her sons will escape the hell that is Angels Rest.”

Blaze eyed him. “Seriously.”

Easton shrugged. “I just finished a medieval studies course. Finals always make me a little nuts.”

Blaze shook his head. “Medieval… I thought you were going for a master’s in chemistry.”

“That too.” Easton took a long draught off his beer then tilted the bottle meaningfully at Blaze. “Anyway, tell me I’m wrong.”

Blaze watched Annie slinging glasses, a crooked grin lighting her face.

What would the wolf spirit give her? Would it make her happy in the end?

He might not have his twin’s study skills, but he could eyeball a raggedy, understory ponderosa and calculate exactly where to make his cut to drop it without knocking a needle off the old-growth giants. What were the chances he could make his way through this twisting puzzle without getting hurt?

“I think she’s my mate,” he replied.

Easton stiffened, nostrils pinching as if he’d caught a scent he didn’t like. “Does she know?”

“I don’t know how I could know. It’s not the mating season.”

“Then maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you should let her go.”

Blaze snagged the beer from his brother’s hand. When Easton squawked again, he held up a silencing finger. “Maybe you should save your brain cells for that fancy damn graduate degree. Besides, I know you’re driving.” His twin couldn’t run home; he never shifted. “Do you want Gypsy to take your keys?”

Easton made a low sound of derision. “As if the beasts ever cared about rules.”

Sometimes it wasn’t rules but laws of nature.

“Annie isn’t going to stay in Angels Rest,” Blaze said quietly. “She has…things she wants to do.”

“Don’t we all?”

Not really. He just wanted to be what he was. He wasn’t trying to make amends for it, like his brother was. He wasn’t going to forge a new world for shifters at his alpha’s side. He was just a wolf.

But in this quiet, dark time of the year, he was running up against forces that were too much for him alone.

“What should I tell her?”

Easton dragged one empty hand over his mouth. “What did Dad tell Mom? Whatever you do, don’t tell her that.” When Blaze glared at him, he sighed. “Nothing. Tell her nothing. Because there’s nothing you can say or do until she decides.”

When Blaze didn’t respond, Easton shook his head and took his beer back. “Better you than me, bro.” And he ambled off to mingle with the friends he’d left behind in high school.

Blaze stared across the bar at Annie. As if she felt the weight of his gaze, she glanced up from the till and smiled.

“Okay?” she mouthed at him.

“Fine,” he whispered back. And she would be fine. For the first time, he understood why his mother had pushed so hard to get him to go to college, and why she’d given up and focused on Easton.

He wanted to give Annie everything too.

And instead, he was going to let her go.

Annie tied off the trash and hauled the heavy bag out of the bin, wiping sweat from her brow. The night was still in full swing—literally, by the jukebox—and the coming holiday had brought out the party animals. All the animals, really. While she was collecting wet napkins and gnawed swizzle sticks, she got to meet Easton.

She would’ve known he was Blaze’s twin even if he hadn’t introduced himself that way. He had the same looks and—despite the flush of alcohol on his unmarked cheeks—some of the same shadows in his eyes.

She whisked away his empties and made a mental note to be sure he made it to the trailer later. “Why aren’t you sitting with your brother?”

“He’s brooding. Sexily, I might add.”

“Really?” Annie resisted the urge to glance over her shoulder. “About what?”

“You.”

She also resisted the urge to say “really” again. “Let him know he can brood sexily around me anytime.”

“You should tell him that.”

“I think I will, at the end of my shift.”

“Eww.”

She grinned. “You started it.”

“So I did.”

She warned Gypsy she was taking the trash out back and would be gone a minute. Maybe she’d take a quick little break to talk to Blaze. Or maybe they wouldn’t talk…

Distracted by those delicious thoughts, she bumped her ass into the release bar on the back door and stepped out toward the trash cans and recycle bins.

The snowfall had thickened while she worked, and half an inch coated the frozen ground underneath. Her sneakers on the gravel were fine, but when she stepped up onto the concrete pad, her foot skidded a little.

Unbalanced by the heavy trash, she ducked to set the two bags on the ground.

A crowbar smashed into the edge of the bin with a resounding clang.

She flinched away with a cry of alarm, and the bar just missed her head before it sliced downward to split open the trash bag.

A cruel grip on her upper arm swung her around and sent her reeling against the unyielding side of the bin.

She stared into Tomas’ leering face.

How had she ever believed he was the one for her? No, she’d never believed that. She’d just not believed there could be anyone else.

Like her werewolf.

She took a breath to scream for Blaze.

From the small of his back, Tomas pulled a gun, and the shout withered in her throat to a dry whimper.

He looked worse than she remembered, puffy and pale under the unflinching security light. She hadn’t seen him since the trial and had barely glanced at him even then. She had focused on the Christmas stickers from her sisters decorating her cast; the DA had told her the stickers were a nice touch. She had told him she didn’t want her little sisters growing up to think men like Tomas were all they could expect.

And now she had proof. And she wouldn’t risk losing Blaze to this true monster who had risen from her past.

She put her hand on her hip. “You get lazy in prison, Tommy? Crowbar? Gun? You always used your fists.”

“Didn’t seem to convince you,” he drawled.

A couple of his boys lurked on the other side of the bins. She wrinkled her nose at them. “Yeah, you had to send one of them to do your dirty work.”

He kicked at the spilled trash, spreading it farther. “Looks like you’re doing the dirty work now.” He shot her an almost wounded glare. “After I gave you everything.”

“When you gave me that concussion I must’ve forgot it all.”

One of the goons snickered, and Tomas slammed the butt of the gun against the can. “Shut the fuck up!”

She and the goon glanced at each other, not quite sure which of them he was talking to. Probably both. Yeah, he’d always been a rager. Good thing, or he might’ve shot her in the back and left with no one the wiser. If she could just get him to make a little more noise and a little more stink…

She wrapped her arms around her middle, cramming her tits up into the place where she’d left the top snap of the shirt undone. Snowflakes settled on her bare skin. “Look, Tommy”—and he did, his gaze fastening on her breasts—“it’s fuckin’ freezing out here. Come inside and I’ll get you a beer.”

The goon she’d eyeballed took a step forward as if that sounded good to him.

Tomas spat at her sneakers. “Forget it, Annie. Too late for that. You sent me away.”

The chill from the snow sank too deep. She remembered the terror of sitting in the air-conditioned courtroom in Albuquerque in August, colder than the high desert in winter, reciting from her halting memory the list of her injuries, Tomas’ glare trying to ice her into silence.

But now… Just like her, in their time apart, he’d changed. He wasn’t the same monster he’d been.

He was worse.

And despite that, she knew she was never again going to let his kind rule her heart with fear and hopelessness. Slowly, she let her hands fall to her sides and shook her hair back from her face. The snow on her face felt soft and fresh, carrying the scent of a faraway ocean.

She breathed deep. “Last chance, Tommy.” The words rumbled low in her chest.

“Tommy,” the goon whispered. “Her eyes…”

Aah-eee!

The cry echoed around her, not in her ears, but deep inside her.

Blaze!

From the dark side of the roadhouse raced a lean, powerful shadow. Under the security light, the brindled fur touched with snow glimmered like the desert itself come alive.

A second, matching shadow was right behind.

“Fuckin’ dogs, man!” cried the goon. He swiveled toward the parking lot, slipping in the snow.

Tomas’ second heavy pulled a gun from his pocket and fired.

The blast shattered the silent night, and Annie echoed it with a cry of fury and fear when a second shot ended in a pained yelp.

But neither wolf paused in their charge.

Tomas darted toward her, reaching for her arm as he always did. But she spun away.

Reaching into the recycle bin in the same motion, she continued her circle and smashed the heavy, homemade huckleberry wine bottle into the side of his head.

The glass splintered. Droplets of dark wine and bright blood spattered across the snow.

Tommy staggered, took one step away, and then the first wolf hurtled onto his back, plunging him into the spilled trash.

The second goon screamed as the other wolf tore into his gun hand. The third goon was nowhere to be seen, though the sound of tires spinning over snow, desperate to escape, made his path clear enough. Annie remembered what Dare had said about the taste of blood.

It wasn’t nasty. It was justice.

She threw back her head and howled.

And the wolves sang back.

9

As Christmas Eves went, at least it was better than some.

Gypsy had called her brother, the sheriff’s deputy, as soon as she saw the altercation on her camera.

“What the fuck,” she growled. “Those city fuckwads think we don’t do security?”

“I think they didn’t know it was fanged,” Annie said.

Tommy was lugged unconscious from the trash pile. His mangled goon was fished, half frozen, from Angel Creek where he’d tried to cross the water to throw “the guard dogs” off his scent.

“He saw that in a movie, I bet,” Easton said. The flesh-colored bandage on his neck was unobtrusive enough that no one gossiping in Gypsy’s the next day felt the need to comment.

Except Blaze, who said, “Duck next time.”

“Duck duck goose,” Easton countered. “It’s all fair game.”

The third goon had driven half the night then slid off the road in the snowstorm and was picked up by local police who had the make, model, license plate, suspect description, and a lot to say about dumb criminals who swore they were attacked by wolves.

“DA says I probably won’t have to testify again,” Annie told Blaze as they drove to his mother’s house for Christmas Day brunch.

“Good,” he said.

“But I would.”

“Yeah, you would.”

Though flecks of rust stained the snow around the hinges, the gate was open. A dark-haired woman waited at the front door, and she held Blaze for a long moment in silence.

Then she turned to Annie. “I hear you are waiting for your wolf.”

Annie glanced at Blaze then nodded a little warily. It was one thing to bash murderous ex-boyfriends over the head, but facing a werewolf mother…

“This was a good place for my boys to run,” the Domingo matriarch said. “Come here anytime.”

After dinner, Easton had to do dishes, though he complained about his flesh wound.

“Keeps you humble, college boy,” his mother told him. “So you remember where you came from.” Then she sent Blaze and Annie to walk in the walled garden behind the house.

Sheltered from the wind, Christmas roses and witch hazel blossomed between the stark stands of palm and agave.

“I wonder if there’s hope…” Blaze murmured. Then he shook his head.

But Annie threaded her fingers through his and gave him an admonishing shoulder bump. “Anyone can change,” she reminded him. “Except you. You’re perfect exactly the way you are.”

“That’s me. Avoided college. Clearing brush. Just perfect. When I’m not gnawing on people.”

She peered up at him with a grin. “I like when you gnaw on me.”

His eyes glinted, but the shifting hues of the twinkle lights hung from the garden wall made him hard to read. “You like the wolf.”

Something about his tone seemed off to her. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Being a werewolf was going to solve all my troubles. But I guess I brought my troubles with me.” She hugged him closer. “And then when you ran toward me…” She lifted their joined hands to her lips and kissed his knuckles. Then nipped him. “I was so scared and thrilled, and I just wanted…I don’t even know what.”

He took a short step away from her, though their hands were still coupled. The cold wind off the hills ruffled the dark hair over his eyes. “Remind me what you want.”

Even this close, she couldn’t quite figure out what was lurking in his gaze, but the heat of his body and breath ghosted around her, triggering an answering flicker deep within her.

“I want the wolf,” she whispered.

He froze in his tracks, and as if the words were coming from somewhere far away—or echoing in someone else’s ears—she heard what she’d said. I want the wolf. As if the only reason she was there was to get bitten. Well, that had been the reason at first. Now…

She closed the remaining distance between them, cutting off the wind so the restless lock of his hair stilled. She centered her hand over his heart. “I want you. You are my wolf.”

One furious thud of his pulse slammed into her hand, and then he was pulling her up against his chest. His mouth crashed down on hers.

She moaned at the hard thrust of his tongue and the even harder press of his heavy erection into her belly. She might not be able to tell what he was thinking, but she knew what he wanted.

“I want you to stay,” he growled. “I swore I wouldn’t ask, wouldn’t make you choose, but I want you to stay with me.”

She reached up to frame his face with her hands, staring at him incredulously. “Of course I want to stay. You are my wolf, my Christmas wish. You are my mate. But the only gift I have for you is…me. Is that enough?”

He matched her gesture and tipped their foreheads together. “That is everything to me.”

She thrust her cold hand down the front of his jeans.

His head jerked up. “Aah! Eee!”

“I’d use my teeth, but we don’t have time for games.”

“What are you—”

Once his fly was wide open, she grabbed her own collar points and yanked them aside. The pearl snaps parted with a clatter like reindeer hooves, and she gasped at the winter wind swirling over her bare breasts. Her nipples hardened into peppermint candy points of pearly red against her white skin.

Blaze grinned. “This is a good gift.”

Then the fever swirled around her, the warmth of her pale brindled fur and the heat in his eyes bringing high summer to the coldest night.

Blaze jumped to the top of the wall, his tail arched over his back in challenge. She hesitated only long enough to admire him before she set all four feet against the stones and launched herself after him.

They paused to stare out at the stillness of the winter desert. Her throat tightened at the beauty as tiny silver snowflakes—or maybe they were stars—fell from the sky. Then Blaze nipped at her ear and bolted away, and she was just a breath behind.

His laughing howl left a trail of shimmering crystals in the velvet darkness that she would joyfully follow forever.

The End

ABOUT ELSA JADE

Elsa Jade, author of the Wolves of Angels Rest series, is the werewolf-wranglin’ pen name of Jessa Slade, who writes paranormal romance and urban fantasy romance—basically anything with explosions AND kisses! Try her award-winning science fiction romance QUEEN OF STARLIGHT free at most retailers. http://elsajade.com