Dark Wolf (Shadow Pack Book 1) (4 page)

He thinks I’m beautiful
, Katie thought giddily as she looked at him, hiding behind her scowl and holding back her giggles with no little effort. He stood proud as a king, wearing nothing but her baseball cap and a pink flannel toga, and he was demanding answers? He looked absolutely ridiculous. But also dark. And mysterious. She relived a pleasant thrill at the thought of his touch but squashed that feeling immediately. This man oozed raw sex, which made her turn away again as she slid on a pair of blue jeans. After a moment’s hesitation—modesty in a one-room cabin was hard to come by—she yanked her nightshirt over her head and started to stuff her breasts into a lacy pink bra.
He
did not frighten her in the least. She was damned if she would retreat to a bathroom that she could barely turn around in because of him. Her hands were still trembling from the aftereffects of his touch. Let him sweat a bit over an expanse of naked skin. He had started this. Paybacks were a bitch.

∙•∙

When her breasts spilled out of the nightshirt she slipped over her head, perfect globes topped with pink nipples that were still hard from their earlier spooning, David thought his knees would buckle beneath him. “I asked you a question…” He took a threatening step toward her. He hoped she had not heard him swallow his tongue when she slid the shirt off. He was certain if she flashed him again, he would come then and there, onto his borrowed blanket. She ignored him and continued dressing, adjusting her breasts in the cups of her bra. Each movement felt like a deliberate goad. She was going to kill him. “Not very modest, are we?”

She snorted as she clipped the back of the flimsy bra together. “Sure, naked-in-a-snow bank guy, I’m not very modest. Now, I have a breakfast date, and if you want a ride to wherever it is that you come from, I would suggest that you slip on my flip-flops that are by the door and hook that blanket on a little better. Because I have nothing that will come close to fitting you.” Turning into the bathroom, Katie left the door open to brush her teeth and run a brush through her hair. “Unless you have clothes out there underneath the snow? Where am I going to be dropping you…whatever your name is?”

It was his turn to snort as he tried to wedge the tiny pink flip-flops onto his feet. The violent surge of curiosity and jealousy that arose when she mentioned a breakfast date took him by surprise, the emotions surging through his gut. He examined his feet as he tried to get control of his emotions. Damn, his heels hung a good five inches over the edge of her sandals. And damn, she wasn’t stupid, so he couldn’t walk outside naked and disappear into the woods to change into a wolf as soon as he was sure she wasn’t looking. He would have to let her drive him home to Hawkeye Manor. “My name is David Finn. I have no idea where my clothes are, and I would appreciate a ride home if it is not too far out of your way.” He ground out the words, hoping she would not ask where the offending garments might be.

∙•∙

Katie started for a moment but immediately regained her composure. The blanket-wearing molester in front of her was David Finn, the reclusive Scotsman who owned most of the mountain they were standing on, including her cabin. She should have guessed…the accent was a dead giveaway. The whole waking-up-beside-a-hot-naked-guy probably threw her off. “Then you would be my landlord. This is a singular way to collect the rent. I usually just mail it in to your rental agent.” She sat down on the overstuffed armchair by the fire and jerked on a pair of heavy wool socks and then her boots. “I’m going to start the Jeep and let it warm up for a few minutes, then check to see how bad the driveway is. I don’t suppose you, as my landlord, would spring for the guy who plows your drive to make a stop at my house on days like this, would you? You should think about making my driveway more accessible if you are going to make a habit of streaking by moonlight through the woods.”

Katie strode out of the house, slamming the heavy door behind her. He looked an idiot, standing in the middle of her house dressed like an escapee from a gay pride toga party.
I’ve got every right to be furious
, she thought ruefully. He had taken wild liberties, although she had been in about as much control of her actions as he had been, and he was now as horrified as she was, hopefully.

∙•∙

Katie Duncan brought out something in him that he was powerless to resist. He needed to get out of here, now. He was still aflame with a need to sink himself into her, to spill his seed. The need for a mate at that moment was the strongest he had ever felt.

He stepped closer to the painting on the easel to examine it and occupy his mind.
For a woman who normally has such a sunny mien, she can paint some dark subjects,
he mused as he looked over a scene from a nightmare. A menacing and monstrous Southern mansion, complete with pillars and two-story porches, stood overlooking a storm swept ocean. She had managed to give the house the appearance that it might at any moment crack open a gaping mouth and take a bite out of whoever was looking at the painting. There were several other paintings that were obviously Katie’s work lining the walls. Some of the works were landscapes, some were of people. All held an overlying darkness that both fascinated and repelled him. But none had the dripping sense of evil the painting she was presently working on possessed. He wondered if the house in the painting was a product of her imagination or a creation of memory. If she had painted it from a memory, it was a bad one.

Katie returned a few minutes later to order him into her green Jeep Wrangler, interrupting his examination of her home. She giggled as he shuffled his way through the snow to the now warmed-up vehicle, which she had parked as far from the front door as she could manage. David realized that the glaring sunlight had awakened him fully as an involuntary shiver ran through his body. Full color pictures raged through his head of her body and the feel of her heat beside him. God…he itched for her so badly his hands were twitching as if they had a life of their own. He clenched his fists, hoping she did not notice that he was shaking with need.

He climbed into the passenger seat, brushing the snow off his exposed feet as she got behind the wheel. “Do you think you could have parked a little farther out?” he asked mockingly, trying not to notice the way her spun-gold hair tumbled over her shoulders and caught the light of the morning sun.

Katie grinned, a smile that made his heart swell as well as his cock—despite the cold—thankfully hidden under his blanket. “I thought the walk would cool you off, hot stuff.” She flipped on the four-wheel drive and tugged the Jeep into gear, hitting the gas so suddenly David was slammed first against his seat and then against the window as she skillfully maneuvered her vehicle through the fresh powder.

“I don’t suppose that I’m going to get any kind of explanation of why you were where you were, dressed or undressed as you were last night,” she said, her eyes concentrating on the freshly plowed mountain road the Jeep had burst onto after about two minutes of path breaking.

David had been trying to think up a plausible explanation ever since he woke up with his cock snuggled against her ass this morning. He paused and then made the leap. “Someone set off an alarm in the woods at my estate last night. Whoever it was headed toward your place at about two a.m. I went to check it out, and the next thing I knew, I woke up with you.” He left out
how
they had awoken. He examined her expression to see if she was buying it. “They must have jumped me and left me to freeze to death.”

∙•∙

Every drop of blood drained from Katie’s face, and a second shudder ran through her body—one that had nothing to do with her sexy landlord—as she realized what kind of people might be wandering the woods in the middle of the night. If they knew she was there, why didn’t they take her? A gentleman farmer checking up on her wouldn’t matter to Ambrose.

She carefully schooled her features to a calmness she didn’t feel for her passenger’s sake, although she had the urge to throw the Jeep into reverse, fly back to her house, pack, and make a run for it. Her heart sank at the thought of running again.

David broke into her thoughts. “Are you all right?”

Katie looked over at his face, truly examining him. The well-cut planes of his face had been worn by the elements and softened. Few idle rich men possessed the wind-worn crow’s feet that appeared at the corners of his concerned brown eyes. She tried to grin, but it came out as a grimace.

“Do you have any idea who would be in my woods at that time of the night?” His dark eyes narrowed as he looked at her guilty face.

Unable to speak of it, she gave her best “not-a-clue” shrug as she turned into the circular drive of his rustic, gray stone mansion and pulled up under the portcullis. “Here we are, Mr. Finn,” Katie said in her most dismissive tone. The man was already too close, and she did not want to see anyone get entangled in the malicious web of her family drama. It would be deadly. “I think you might want to call the police about this. People who graze your skull with a bullet and leave you naked in a snow bank need to be in jail. And a doctor’s appointment might be in order, also.”

There was one other possibility that would explain his appearance and the healed wound that she had glimpsed this morning. She had seen a huge dog in the woods that resembled a wolf and sensed there was something odd about the way it looked at her. Her mind absolutely wanted to put two and two together, but the problem was, even if the impossible was possible, she still could not drag him into her problems.

David looked into her face once more and alighted from the Jeep, wrapping himself in the blanket and his dignity as a trim, middle-aged woman came running out of the front door to greet him. “Thank you, Miss Duncan, I will keep that advice in mind.” He slammed the door of the Jeep and headed toward the house, not once looking back.

She shifted, and the Jeep kicked into gear behind him and headed out to Seven Devils Road on the way to Blowing Rock. She watched him in the rearview mirror as he turned back to look at her green vehicle, and then he disappeared from her view. Could David know? Did he have some kind of inkling of what was going on? She felt bereft and lost for a moment. What was wrong with her? She barely knew this man, and now she was pining for him? Katie shook her head in disgust and drove on through the morning.

»»•««

Inside the warmth of the Jeep, Katie clutched the steering wheel so tightly the bones of her hands hurt. She was tired of running. She was going to see Uncle Frank this morning. Maybe it was time to make a stand. Then someday when a gorgeous, intelligent man rode in her car, she could show some interest instead of feigning dislike to protect him. Any suitor who showed the slightest interest in Katie Duncan was doomed to the wrath of her stepfather, who wanted her body for himself.

The terror of those days and nights came rolling into her thoughts. The days of malicious mind games played on both her and her mother. The awful groping when he caught her alone in the halls. The dreaded hunts that she only participated in to buy her mother some precious moments of peace. The tense nights of listening for heavy footsteps that paced back and forth in the hall outside her bedroom door, never entering, but so close that she would ball up her fist, stuffing it in her mouth to keep from screaming. Katie would hide under the blankets, wide awake until the light of day, and then descend to breakfast to see her mother bearing the marks of his rage at the woman’s infertility and her daughter’s refusals. Thinking about her stepfather, she felt the urge to retch again. Luckily there was nothing in her stomach to throw up.

“That must have been some midnight run,” Nan said slyly, wiggling her eyebrows at her husband. Bill looked like he was struggling to keep the grin off his face. Nan was an attractive lady, dressed for the morning in pressed jeans and a sky-colored cable knit cashmere sweater that perfectly set off her laughing blue eyes. “The pretty lass couldn’t loan you an old overcoat?”

She seemed pleased with his predicament, probably hoping David had found a girl with a broad enough mind to accept his unique heritage, since it seemed he was doomed to not find a mate among his own kind. The picture the lord of the mountain must have presented this morning had been undoubtedly hysterical as he stood in the center of his hall dressed—or rather undressed—in his outlandish getup.

The couple had worked for his family since David was a child. After the death of his parents, events forced David to make a new start in North Carolina in a city settled by some of his distant relations generations ago. Like the family heirlooms they were, the pair had decided to accompany him. Nan was the housekeeper, cook, and mother figure while Bill looked after everything on the estate that Nan didn’t already have handled.

Both were privy to the secrets of David Finn’s heritage and took full advantage of that knowledge when needed. David was used to dealing with the ribbing of his housekeeper and thanked God that Nan’s husband, at least, had some sense of decorum.

Bill had let go the man who usually plowed the drive in favor of doing it himself just for the pleasure of driving the shiny new green tractor outfitted with a snow blade. Today, he was dressed in tan Carhartt  winter coveralls against the cold. The big man scowled at his wife, his nose and cheeks as red as apples, and his bushy gray eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead like two wooly worms. “What kind of woman sends a man out in the cold in a pink blanket, I ask you? David, you should have ducked out on her and gone to wolf, lad. That girl is as coldhearted as the ground outside, I tell you!”

David glared at both of his nosy employees and muttered something about having some work to do in his office. Later, showered and clothed, he sat in front of his computer in thoughtful repose. The large size of the rooms and the expansive windows with sweeping views of the woods and mountains usually kept his wolf spirit from feeling caged and uneasy.

But there was no comfort for him right now, even though his wound from the night before was almost gone. There was only a faint white scar marking the crown of his head, and that would disappear soon enough. A heaping plate of Nan’s granola pancakes, thick slabs of crisp bacon, and a steaming cup of black coffee sat on a tray nearby, untouched.