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“Wait—”

But the man was already gone. A shadow again, fast for his size, around the corner before I finished the word. He left me in the dark with my heart still beating fast and no explanation for why a scarred stranger in a hoodie had just ordered me out of my own alley and then vanished like he’d never been solid.

A ghost with a guardian.

I didn’t just shiver from a draft this time. My whole body started to shake a little.

I walked the last few feet to my door on legs that didn’t feel entirely like mine, let myself in, and threw the deadbolt. I stood there listening for footsteps that didn’t come. But why would he come back?

My reflection looked back from the workroom window — hair escaping from my ponytail like it always did, cheeks pink from more than cold, mouth parted like I’d been kissed instead of warned.

Tall, I thought, climbing the stairs without turning on any lights. Dark.

The pulse between my legs said trouble, and it would not shut up.

“I don’t need this,” I muttered to myself as I pulled the case of bath salts and a forgotten case of beard oil toward me. “I need a snack and a hot bath.”

CHAPTER TWO

Wilder

The bear sign had been fresh — dumpster lid knocked aside, a dark smear along the brick, claw marks at a height that meant a big boar, probably the same one that had been spotted on the ridge for the past few weeks. Grimm had caught the scent the second we turned the corner and gone forward before I could stop him.

Which was the only reason the woman with the doughnut in her pocket hadn’t walked into two hundred pounds of irritated black bear.

I hadn’t planned on speaking to her. I hadn’t planned on the ten full seconds I stood in the dark and watched her negotiate with my dog like he was a customer holding up her line — low, reasonable, offering him pastry like it was a serious opening bid. Grimm’s tail had started thumping against the pavement before I reached them. That told me almost everything I needed to know about her.

The rest I saw for myself. She had dark hair that curled at the ends and a stubborn set to her jaw that didn’t fold when I told her not to walk back there alone. Most people took one look at the size of me, or the scar, or both, and found somewhere else to be.

She hadn’t. But then, she didn’t know who I was.

The Ghost of Lone Mountain is what they called me.

I had a reputation for staying on my mountain unless I was called out for a rescue. When I had to come into town, it was always at night, if possible. If it wasn’t possible, I did without.

I’d noticed her scent before I noticed I was doing it. Something warm — vanilla and something else lingering on her, probably from whatever she made in that shop of hers. Then she’d come into view. The generous curve of a hip under a practical sweater, the pouty mouth that looked damn kissable, even after she opened it to argue. And the way her expression didn’t change when the light caught my face.

I had not been with a woman in a long time. My body remembered that fast. A thick, sudden heat low in my groin that had tightened my dick and my jaw. I pictured, against my will, backing her up against the cold brick and finding out if she tasted as good as she smelled. I could almost feel my hand in that hair, my mouth on the pulse in her throat. I pictured my thigh between hers, the sound she’d make when she felt how hard I got for her.

I shut it down. I was good at shutting things down. I had built a life out of it.

But I didn’t shut it all the way down. I walked the rest of the alley half-hard and angry about it.

She’d smiled when Grimm left her side after a slight hesitation on his part. No doubt she thought she’d made a friend.

And maybe she had. Grimm was a little less anti-social than I was. But not by much. He didn’t tolerate strangers unless he was tracking them. At least, that’s how he’d been until tonight.

I walked to the alley’s far end to make sure the bear had actually moved on. It had — loping toward the trees behind the hardware store with the unhurried confidence of something that knew this town wouldn’t do much about it.

Kind of like my relationship with the town. We tolerated each other.

Keeping track of dangerous wildlife wasn’t my job, but I did it anyway. My job was pulling people out of the messes they made when they ignored warnings. Dispatch picked up on the second ring. I told them to contact the wildlife officer on duty and put a police patrol on the block until morning. They asked — because everyone in this town eventually asked — whether I needed backup.

“No,” I said. “Grimm had it handled before I did.”

The dog gave me a smug look the entire walk back to the truck.

He rode with his head out the window most of the way up the mountain. At the cabin he walked halfway to the porch and then just stood there, facing down toward town.