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Then he bent down to
pick up the tattered trash bag just as Holly leaned down to do the same, and
their hands and cheeks brushed at the same moment. Dustin’s senses filled
with…with lavender and cedar, the memory of hips swaying to “I Want Some Sugar
In My Bowl”, a naughty word like fuck from those bee stung lips, and the
anxious tremor along her flushed skin and ripe curves. Holly and Dustin both
straightened, gazes flared and locked, only he stood up with a step forward
into her. He couldn’t keep the growl out of his breath, the rumble
reverberating gut deep, from the root of him, his swelling cock. The hair on
the back of his neck stood on end as the wolf in him pushed hard to free
itself, to rise up right through his bristling skin. Dustin’s shoulders settled
and shifted back as his hips strained forward and his hands clenched into
fists, the only thing he could do to keep from grabbing her, jerking her
against him, or throwing her to down onto the grass and….

She
can’t pretend we’re not flirting now
, he thought as he
angled his face down over hers and took the luscious pad of her lower lip so
slowly, so carefully, but so hungrily between his teeth. He snarled but didn’t
bite; he held her still and sucked while she trembled against him. The wolf
inside him thrilled at her reaction, at the musk of lust mixed with fear. He
scraped her lower lip gently with the edge of his teeth and sucked again, then
lapped upward with the tip of his tongue to taste her upper lip, sweet with
wine, coppery with the blood coursing beneath her skin. Holly’s eyes sank
closed, millimeter by millimeter, and she held her breath one full heartbeat,
two, three. He distinctly heard each one, felt them in the most minute pulsing
of her blood. Dustin lost track of the beats when his own throbbing pulse began
pounding in his head, as she sighed into his mouth and went pliant and
submissive against him.

It was the worst thing
Holly could have done, like she’d rolled over and offered her belly—or her sweet,
vulnerable pussy. Their very first kiss was Dustin forcing her submission,
biting his little lupa, and she didn’t even understand what was happening, so
he couldn’t…. Fuck, he couldn’t do what his body wanted to do and strip her
bare and put her on all fours, couldn’t work himself wildly, brutally into her
tight core from behind while she bucked and bounced against him and whined at
the burn and the stretch and the need between her legs. If she submitted to him
fully, like that, she had to know what she was doing and what it meant.

A split second before
he reached his limit, before he’d gone so far he could only give in to the urge
to drive his tongue into her mouth and his cock into her sex, Dustin stepped
back from Holly. He steadied them both with one hand on her shoulder, holding
himself back from her by pushing her away, the other hand wiping his mouth. She
probably thought he was wiping away the wetness of her lips from his, but it
was really to hide the fact that he was outright salivating at the idea of
taking her.

“Holly, I’m sorry.”
Behind his hand, Dustin was slurring his words, canines elongating just enough
for him to feel them and know the wolf was coming if he didn’t get the hell out
of there. “I just—.”

“No, no, it’s okay,”
Holly said in a breathy rush, not looking at him. “Stuff happens. It doesn’t
mean anything.” Then she started around Dustin on her way back into her
townhouse, her steps hurried, gestures stiff and tight. “I mean, you probably
have a girlfriend who wouldn’t be happy about that. Enough said. We can just
forget it happened.”

She didn’t even look
back.
Goddamnit
. He could guess all the things she
was thinking, and he couldn’t stop her to explain, not unless he wanted to have
a lot more to be sorry for.

Dustin turned his face
toward a renewed gust of wind, up toward the nearly whole disk of the glowing
moon. He gulped air and let the chill on his skin and in his lungs beat back
the prickle of fur and the pain of shifting tissue and bone. With the wilding progression
so far advanced, Dustin could have turned in seconds, but it took two full
minutes and a forced march across the complex parking lot to calm himself
enough to say he was even mostly human again.

And all the while,
every single second, the wolf in him gnawed at his insides. It demanded he
turn, feed, mate with a ravening hunger and savagery. It
demanded
he mate, but surely it meant fuck, not mate. Not
mate
.

It occurred to Dustin
only then that he’d never stopped to wonder what the difference would feel
like, between finding a woman who hardened his cock and one that called to his
wolf in a way no other did. He had always just assumed he would never actually
mate, as female Odin’s Wolves were rare, but hadn’t he heard Ron talk awhile
back about a Fenris Wolf who’d paired with a wolfkin who had never even turned
and another shifter who had somehow bonded with a full on human?

Dustin did remember one
particular pack teaching quite clearly: one of the few things capable of
arresting the wilding progression that eventually obliterated the human in a
werewolf was finding a true mate.

CHAPTER
THREE

After slamming the door
and locking it, an action with more than a little symbolic meaning, Holly
sagged against the wall in her perfectly textured, utterly beige entryway and
smothered a sob with both her hands. It really wasn’t like her. Nothing about
her life lately was like her.

She wasn’t interesting
enough to have been attacked by a freaking werewolf, of all things, and just
because she’d gotten tired of waiting for her college “friends” to finish
getting wasted at one of the local bars and had started to walk home through
that dark parking lot alone. There had been no reason to think it was going to
be that dangerous, on a bright night with a full moon, clear enough to see for
miles.

Holly snorted mid-sob.
It had been a full moon. Werewolf. Full moon. But she’d also already learned
that real werewolves—she snorted again despite herself—didn’t depend on the
moon for whether or not they shifted.

And that was another
matter. She wasn’t educated or worldly or sophisticated or
alpha-FBI-secret-agent enough to be working even as a research analyst for some
covert government agency helping “strike teams” track and exterminate dangerous
supernaturals that humans never knew existed right in their midst. Still a
whole semester from finishing her communications and computer data systems
degrees, Holly was struggling to man her desk at the Agency and complete her
coursework with night classes three times a week. It was Friday night; that was
where she was supposed to be right then, in class.

Instead she was moping
over ice cream and running into Dustin Berg out on the walkway and kissing him.
Holly wasn’t skinny enough or charming enough or flirty enough to let herself
think for even a second that a man that tall, that fit, that good-looking, that
confident and outgoing would kiss her out of anything but pity, curiosity, or
indiscriminately drunken horniness. And it wasn’t like Holly to lower herself,
to sacrifice what dignity she’d earned over years of lonely discipline, in
order to serve any of those instincts. Even for Dustin Berg.

“Damn, what’s gotten
into you, Holly?” she asked herself, still slumped to one side against the
wall, still shuddering periodically in a mixture of snorts and tears.

He came around the
corner, just one step, just into view, saying quietly, “I have asked myself the
same thing many times.”

Holly’s whole body
jerked in shock at realizing she wasn’t alone in her own townhouse. She sucked
in a gasp so hard and so huge that it came back out as a choking hiccup, and
she threw her hands over her mouth again.

This made him smile, a
sad little quirk at one corner of his remarkably full, pretty mouth—this total
stranger standing just inside her living room, just around the corner toward
her dining room and kitchen and that sliding glass door she was always
forgetting to lock. He stood sideways to her, looking at Holly over the
shoulder of his black overcoat, which was tattered and grimy in a way that made
her think he was a homeless person. His black woolen pants, black sweater,
black scarf, they were all oversized and threadbare and torn, stained and
soiled. In the light of the overhead lamp, the splatter pattern on the toes of
his heavy black boots shone a dull brown-red that made her suspect the drops
were dried blood. She tried not to stare too knowingly at that.

Speaking slowly,
gently, breathlessly, Holly asked, “What are you doing in my house? Maybe
you’re lost? I don’t know you.”

The lean black-haired
man, his skin pale even for winter, gave Holly another smile. It was wider,
less sad, more indulgent this time. “You do.”

Staring, Holly tried to
place him, though she was positive she’d have remembered meeting a man who
looked so remarkable. He was in his mid to late thirties, maybe. His eyes shone
in a striking shade of ice blue, reminding her of the husky pup, above
extremely high cheekbones and an angular face that would have been model-level
handsome had he weighed about twenty pounds more. As it was, his cheeks sank in
too much, the wells beneath his eyes too deep and too dark, like bruises. No,
there was no way she’d have forgotten this man.

As though he could tell
she was struggling to recall, the stranger pivoted to face Holly, to give her a
better look. “To be fair,” he said in far too polite a tone for someone who’d
been lurking in her house like he was waiting for her, “we don’t actually know
one another’s names. And it has been many months. Almost a year.” Now it was
also clear he had a faint accent, something Eastern European, maybe Russian.
Wherever he was from, he was long and far removed, with his peculiar
enunciation stretched so thin as to nearly disappear now and then.

Holly shook her head, a
gesture that grew more vehement as the intruder took several steps toward her.
Her own body heavy with shock and fear, she couldn’t shuffle back fast enough
to keep him from catching her by one arm and then grasping her hand. His skin
was cold, maybe from being out in the night, or maybe just cold.

With that firm hold on
her, the man drew Holly into the room and sat her down on the ottoman at the
foot of the sectional she’d bought so there’d be enough seats for everyone if
she ever had a party. She never needed it, because she never threw any. It was
a strange time to be thinking about that, the way people were sometimes
thinking about not having to register their car the next year while it was
spinning out in a high-speed collision or the way people laughed after they’d
hurt themselves unexpectedly—badly—and were bleeding all over a favorite piece
of clothing they had taken such care never to stain.

The point being that
Holly knew this was going to be bad. This was going to be life-changing the way
the attack had been. Then she couldn’t help it; she lifted her face, eyes wide,
and stared.

Pale blue eyes, like
husky eyes,
wolf eyes
stared back.
And he nodded in answer to the question she didn’t ask. Holly hadn’t forgotten
the man, because he hadn’t been a man when she’d met him. When he’d bitten her.
Unbidden, Holly’s free hand went to her left shoulder, knowing just where the
bite marks were under her hoodie.

“That must have been
very confusing for you.” The stranger—the shifter—sounded completely sincere as
he came down on one knee in front of Holly. “And so you didn’t tell anyone what
really happened. They would have thought you were crazy.”

Holly’s racing mind
seized on a detail. “But I did tell. I told the Agency. I work for them now.
They watch me, the townhouse, always. They know you’re here right now. They’ll
be on their way.” But the shifter was shaking his head no, slowly, somberly,
like he was letting down a desperately hopeful child. “You think I’m lying.”

“No, young lady.” He
was still shaking his head. “I think you don’t know the Agency or how it really
works very well.”

When Holly realized a
tear was about to break from her lashes, she sniffed in her breath and puffed
out her chest. She straightened her back and refused to blink. “Why are you
here? To hurt me? To kill me? Why didn’t you do that in the parking lot a year
ago, if that’s what this is about?”

“Hm.” He frowned at the
questions, every expression so openly
expressive
.
“They really didn’t explain much of anything to you, did they? What’s your
name?”

“What?”

“What’s your—?”

“Holly.” Even she was
surprised at how hard she snapped out the word, in the face of the werewolf who
was going to kill her. Or going to try.

“Holly,” he repeated.
“My name is Ivan.” His voice was so pleasant, so courteous, that Holly half
expected him to bow and tell her it was a pleasure to make her acquaintance.
Instead he said, “I had to bite you.”

The shifter said it
apologetically and gently. This whole time, he was speaking with such care and
deliberation, not like he was taking time to find the words or like English was
his adopted language, though it may well have been with a name like Ivan. It
was rather like there was an unnatural calm about him, the kind she’d have
imaged only truly unhinged, truly dangerous people had.