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Near midnight, she
stood in the open doorway to the porch and watched the clouds of an approaching
storm roll in over the bright full moon. It would have been colder outside if
not for that cloud cover acting much like a blanket over the whole forest
basin. Enough of a chill still hung in the night air, though, that Holly needed
a blanket of her own. Inside, she found a stack of woolen covers in a rocking
chair, but she preferred the heavy, fur-lined throw she’d discovered earlier in
a cedar chest tucked into a far corner of the cabin. The fur was worn soft,
pliant, and it smelled of something earthy and spicy and musky with a sweet
scent under that like wine and wildflower honey. Strange, in a very good way.
She toted it out with her onto the porch, into the night air, to watch the
storm rolling in over the lake.

After everything that
had happened thus far, the night seemed unnaturally, impossibly beautiful as
Holly stood on the porch at the banister and gazed at the murky sky while she
unfurled the fur throw. She glanced down at the lush brown cover and wondered
for a second if was real fur. Holly always felt guilty about how much she liked
the feel of real pelts and made sure she only bought fakes. An odd thing to be
thinking about after a werewolf attack and Dustin Berg kissing her and now
being on the run
with
a shifter.
Fashion and office politics and the size of her thighs didn’t seem important at
all amid the electrical charge of a brewing storm, with the distant lap of
water churned by the wind across the lake, and with the intensely green and
earthy smell of the trees and underbrush practically swaddling the cabin and
carpeting the slope down to the reservoir.

Then Holly sighed with
something that could have been contentment, had the circumstances just been a
little bit different, and wrapped herself snug in the fur throw. It was every
bit as warm and comforting as she had expected it to feel, just right for
standing there in the night air and taking in the moment, gathering her
thoughts, gathering herself after everything.

The smells, the lapping
water, the chill of the night air…all came on so intense. More intense by the
moment. So powerful and then so overwhelming that Holly’s head swam, and she
had to close her eyes. That only made it worse. Fur, thick musky loam, the
whispery hiss of wind through redwood branches, the water lapping and burbling
anxiously, excitedly—too far away to hear so clearly, and yet she could. More
chaotic and more vivid than the storm building over the forest was the storm of
senses flaring to life inside her.

I’ve
fallen asleep on the porch swing
, Holly realized,
and I’m having the strangest, most amazing
dream
. It was one of those lucid dreams where she could make her own
decision and move through the landscape as she wished, only a hundred times
more distinct and brilliant and lifelike than anything she’d experienced
before.

Those were among the
last of the truly mundane, human thoughts that went through Holly’s mind. It
was a distinctly inhuman growl that said to her then, “Be a wolf.” Like Ivan
and Dustin. Wild like they were, strong, free, beyond the fear and weakness
that dominated her everyday life. An astonishing inspiration. And she embraced
it, shivering and shuddering with her teeth chattering as the idea of a wolf
became a body.

Holly threw off the fur
blankets and peeled away layers of clothing, of skin and cells, everyday hurts
and anxieties. Her wolf body loped off the porch and into the rich earth, moist
against the pads of her feet. She needed those feet, all four of them, to race
from tree to trail, brush and bush to meadow. With growing speed and power.
Holly yipped and yowled just to hear her own voice, and the night sky above her
turned inky and answered with the flash of lightning and its own snarl of
thunder. The rain on her fur was like the darkness caressing her. It washed the
scents and tastes of the forest off the leaves and blossoms, off the birds and
small hidden prey, and brought them all to Holly to drink in. She rolled in wet
meadow grass and shook herself violently and reveled in the spray of water
radiating from her honey brown fur.

And then Holly ran. She
ran not like a woman with a size sixteen body might have jogged with effort and
discomfort around a track while she worried who would see her but the way a
predator would have run. Nothing to stop her. Flat out. With everything inside
her striding forward, unfettered. From ridge to lakefront, gully to meadow,
boulder peaks to redwood copse. Holly ran until it was all she could do to drag
her wet, furry body up against a massive sequoia trunk and under the shelter of
branches to collapse in a panting heap of sensory bliss. Lungs aching.
Shivering with soppy fur. Streaked in gritty mud. And utterly blissful.

She slept without
dreaming until the vision of Dustin came
.
Good dream
, she thought of the one she’d just finished. She was ready for
another, especially if it involved her fantasy man. It was brighter in this
one, daylight. Holly opened her eyes to narrow slits at the sound of Berg’s low
thunder voice grumbling firmly, demanding she answer him. He leaned over her,
huge and sheltering with those broad shoulders on what was otherwise such a
lean, hard body. Water dripped from that lush brown hair of his, from the leafy
canopy above him. The rivulets danced and trickled in delicate cascades
everywhere around them, glinting in the sun.

“I’m a wolf, too.” Her
voice came out a raspy whisper, her throat sore, but she still chuckled. Holly
meant to use her paw to bat Dustin in his gorgeous face, maybe on the nose, but
she had fingers again. Her skin was wet and bare, except for small bits of leaf
and yellow flower petals clinging to her arm. “Oh, wait, I’m human now,” she
sighed and giggled and waved her hand in his face to show him. “But I used to
be a wolf. A pretty, pretty brown wolf.”

“Holly, look at me,”
Dustin demanded again. “Do you understand me?”

“Of course I don’t
understand you. You’re a man.” Holly burst into laughter at her own wit and
candor. In dreams, she never suffered a lag in clever comebacks, never thought
of what she wanted to say five minutes after she should have said it. And in
dreams, she could do just what she wanted to do, like kiss Dustin Berg.

It wasn’t like real
life, with Dustin kissing her under such confusing circumstances. Holly ran
both her hands up Dustin’s sculpted chest—willing his blue button-front shirt
to go away but failing—then up along his collar to the tensed sinews of his
bare neck. Her fingers threaded through the fine, short hair along his nape and
held him still so she could lean up and cover his warm mouth with hers. He was
all teeth and growls again, but her tongue slid into his mouth with a quick
lick to sooth that down. His tongue, warmer and more insistent, lapped back
into her mouth even as a reproving snarl cycled in the back of his throat. It
reverberated through their kiss, making her head thrum, making the pearl of her
clitoris flare with heat. Holly squeezed her thighs together against that ache,
squirming, moaning.

Against her mouth, as
though he didn’t want to give up the feeling of her lips, Dustin started to
ask, “Holly, what are you—?”

“Lupa,” she sighed.
“Call me lupa.”

“Holly, I don’t think
you know what has happened to you.”

“Lupa,” she said again
and insisted by nipping Dustin the way he had nipped her when he’d kissed her
in the car, in real life.
God
, she
thought in awe and lust,
how can a man
growl like that?

With brutal strength,
with a roughness bordering on savage, Dustin seized Holly by the shoulders and
jerked her up against his chest, making her eyes shoot wide and her breath
catch like a rock in her throat. God, yes, in her fantasies, he was forceful
like this, wild and demanding
and rough
.
Dustin was straddling her hips, the heavy denim of his jeans hugging his
powerful thighs and lightly chaffing hers. She realized it was one of those
dreams, the kind where she was naked when no one else was. It didn’t matter.
She still wanted to fuck Dustin. When, in real life, would she ever have gotten
this chance?

Holly tried to kiss
Dustin again, more urgently, arching her back to press her naked breasts
against him. The shifter reared and pushed her away as though she’d burned him.
He sucked in his breath through clenched teeth, looking almost like he was in
pain but looking even more like he was a beast ready to pounce. His chest
pumped hard beneath that chamois shirt. Between their initial clinch and that
sudden tussle, the first couple of buttons had come open to bare the deep
contours of his muscles again. A fine sheen of brown hair dusted the fullest
curve of his pecs and trailed down the middle of his torso toward those
washboard abs. He straightened over her, pushing up onto the caps of his knees
and angling his tensed, hungry face over hers. Her girlish giggle faded as she
stared into Dustin’s face, as his features came into sharper and sharper focus.

Little by little, in
the chill of the open air, her cheeks bathed in Dustin’s hot breath, Holly
realized what she was feeling was no lucid illusion. The bruising
possessiveness of the shifter’s fingertips digging into the yielding flesh of
her upper arms, the cold metal of his belt buckle against her ticklish
bellybutton, and the swollen bulge of his erection gouging her abdomen
demandingly…. None of it was a dream.

CHAPTER
SIX

Dustin was barely
capable of human thought by the time the wolfkin wriggled out from under him
and began fighting his grip on her arms. She had finally come to her senses,
but too late for his. Her struggle was like fresh blood to his wolf,
encouraging his hunger, his urge to take what his animal wanted. And what he
wanted was his lupa, his mate, his cock in her pussy, his seed in her womb, his
teeth in the flesh of her warm neck where it descended into her bare shoulder.
Dustin stared at that graceful curve, the place a wolf marked his mate, where
he would sink in his canines and pin her while his body took hers in the frenzy
that broke down all barriers and made one mind—one hunger, one focus, one
soul—of two.

The
wolfkin’s
scramble to escape pushed what little patience the shifter had left to the
brink. He stood, dragging her up after him as easily as a wolf seized a
hare
in its mouth. Her breath burst out of her in a gasp
and then a groan as he slammed her back against the tree. His weight held her
there, his knee wedged between her curvy thighs. Fuck, the feeling of warmth
emanating from her sex against his leg made him want to howl and rut and revel.
To drive his rigid cock into that tight sheath of flesh and feel her body
stretching wide to accept him, to feel her taking him core-deep….

Her soft curves were
pliant in his rough hands, even as she squirmed and sighed. Even as she chewed
the lush pink pad of her lower lip. Her breast was the perfect handful as he
kneaded the round globe and lashed at the tender nipple with his tongue. And he
bit, slowly sinking his teeth just deep enough around her pale areola to make
her go still—save for her trembling. She panted shallowly against him, and it
was a delicious sound. Inside, his wolf smacked its lips.

Dustin’s beast brought
out the hot sheen of sweat that preceded his shift, and his eyes began to lose
focus. It was coming, the change, his wolf. Surely only claiming his mate,
mounting her and spending his appetites inside her, could stave off the shift.

“Dustin.” Holly’s voice
was a small, distant whimper. She was breathless. “Dustin, please. I don’t
want…. Not like this. I don’t know what’s happening.”

He felt the wolfkin
shivering against him, and the wolf exulted in it. Only a fraction of Dustin’s
consciousness remained human in that moment, but it was that part that snatched
his beast by the nape and dragged it back. Because as much as Dustin knew that
a great deal of Holly’s trembling was a matter of her primal need, as much as
he could smell how ready her sex was for him, he could also feel and smell and
sense her fear and confusion. If he took her now, as man or wolf, how would he
have been any different from the varg who had violated her mind and body in
that dark parking lot?

“Dustin,” she mewed
again.

“Sh.” Though he wavered
on his feet, still fighting the shift, Dustin breathed out a lulling
reassurance as he lifted his face from Holly’s bare skin. “
Sh
,
it’s okay. I’ve got control. It’s not happening.” Now instead of shoving her
against the rough bark of the tree, he drew the woman against him and rubbed
his hands along the scrapes in her skin. “I won’t let the wolf have you like
that, I promise. When it’s time, it won’t be like this.”

Holly’s voice was still
a timid, stunned whisper. “When it’s time for what?”

Feeling the sting of
guilt in his chest and throat, Dustin wasn’t ready to look Holly in the eye,
but he took her face in his hands and kissed her forehead. She didn’t resist or
rear back for once—no car or apartment a few feet away to use as a hiding
place.

“When it’s time for our
wolves to meet, lupa. When we mate. When I take you.” Holly swallowed hard and
drew in a breath to speak. He felt it in her body against his. “I’ll be gentle
as I can be. If the moment is right, if everything is right, you won’t really
want me to be gentle, though. It won’t scare you like this. You’re just
confused.”