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TILDA
I have to be dead, right?
I’m somewhere warm, safe, comfortable. There’s a strong arm wrapped around my waist, a huge body tucked against my back. I breathe in, and at first I smell the coppery scent of blood…then something else. Somethingnice: incense, red wine,man.
His beard tickles the back of my neck, and I stretch to let him in closer. His lips land on my throat—soft, delicious. I’ve been stripped down to nothing but the black tank top I was wearing under my button-up, and I can feel his pecs against my shoulder blades. I can’t remember exactly how I got here, or where I was the night before, or what I was doing. All I know is the pleasure of his body against mine.
I reach my hand back to find a layer of denim between my palm and his bare skin. Damn. I was hoping to get a good feel of what’s underneath. I sigh into the soft pillow beneath my cheek as his hand skates up my ribs, then tenderly touches a spot thatreallyhurts.
It snaps me back into reality.
I amnotsupposed to be here, and I don’t think I would feel that wound if I was dead.
I jerk up to a seat and practically fall off the bed to get away from whoever is here with me, scrambling backward into a corner. It’s only then that I realize I’m still covered in blood, dry and caked onto my shredded tank top. I look up at my captor with wide, bleary eyes, and he looms over me like death incarnate.
Reyes fucking Garza.
I’ve seen him through binoculars enough times to know him at first glance, even though I’ve never seen himquitelike this. Dressed only in a pair of jeans with a big silver cross hanging over his chest, his skin glows deep bronze in the light of an oil lamp behind him. He’s bigger than I thought he was from a distance—at least 6’6—and completely jacked.
And he’s got his hands up like I’m the one holdinghimhostage.
“It’s okay,” he says in a low voice. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Not going to hurt me?” I repeat, incredulous. “You…I’m covered in blood.”
“I didn’t do that to you,” he says.
“Why do I find that hard to believe?”
“You should,” he says. “Whoever that kid was with you, he was green enough to shoot you right in the gut. I’m the only reason you’re still breathing.”
It all comes back to me in a rush. FuckingDavid. I can remember running through the woods, almost making it to the horses when he panicked and pulled the trigger.
I scramble to touch my wound, not even finding so much as a bandage. It’s just stitched up with about twenty stitches, like I had a minor cut and not a gaping gunshot wound.
“How did I…if he shot me in the gut, how am I awake right now? How am I evenalive?”
Reyes opens his mouth, then closes it again. “We used a lycanthrope technique to get you better,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Why were we…like that?” I ask, gesturing wildly at the bed. “Why are you naked?”
“Not naked,” he says. “Half-dressed. Skin to skin contact was important to help you recover. I…”
He trails off, raking a hand through his hair.
“It’s a lycanthrope thing.”
I gape at him, still reeling from whatever the hell is going on. I still can’t believe that my ally shot me and that I woke up naked—okay,half-dressed—in bed with the man I came here to kill.
Does he know?
“Well, thanks for saving my life, I guess,” I say. “I would like to go now.”
He barks out a laugh, shaking his head. His teeth gleam white, his canines a little sharper than a full human’s might be…and that smile, parting in the midst of his salt-and-pepper beard, sends a tremor of desire shooting right to the pit of my stomach.
I havegotto get out of here. Because whatever wolf thing he was doing in that bed seems to be having an effect on me.
“I think you’re forgetting thatyou’rethe one who came intomyhouse,” he says, crossing his big arms over that broad chest. He lifts his chin and cocks a brow, something strange in his dark eyes that makes me sweat. “Just because I came out on top doesn’t make me the bad guy here.”
