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CHAPTERONE
Adam Cruz watched his friend Jeremiah and his new mate, Honey, as they were introduced to the Wilde Creek wolf pack during the February full moon. The pack clapped and cheered as the two kissed. Adam was happy that Jeremiah had found his truemate—it gave him hope that he’d find his own mate someday.
Alphas Acksel and Brynn wished the pack a good hunt, and Adam went to congratulate Jeremiah and Honey.
“I’ve been worried about you,” Jeremiah said. “I’m sorry that things got crazy, and I wasn’t able to be there for you.”
“I’m cool,” Adam said. He tried to smile, but he knew he’d failed by the way that Jeremiah looked at him with suspicion.
“We can talk later if you want.”
Adam glanced at Honey. “Maybe I’ll take you up on that. Have a good first hunt, man. If anyone deserves to be happy, it’s you.”
Jeremiah grabbed Adam’s arm and stopped him as he turned away. “You deserve to be happy, too.”
He chuckled darkly, casting his gaze up to the dark sky. “Maybe my mate will fall out of the sky tonight, and she won’t give two fucks about my scars or my place in the pack.”
Adam moved away quickly, before Jeremiah’s concern became his undoing. Seeing Jeremiah so happy made something ache deep inside him. He wanted to shake it off as full-moon jitters, but he knew that his wolf was truly aching for a mate. Someone to love. Someone to protect. A female who wouldn’t care that he came from crappy stock, with a gambling-addict dad and a body covered with scars. Ducking into the woods, he wove his way into the darkness and looked for a place to shift.
When he was a teenager and new to shifting, he’d pretended as if his scars hadn’t completely ruined his life, but they had. His skin ached in his human form and his wolf form. There was hardly a time when he wasn’t thinking about how shitty his life was, although he tried to project a confident attitude about his appearance. He didn’t want people to think all he did was complain, even though inside he cursed his dad frequently.
Stopping in a secluded area, he stripped and stretched fully, allowing his skin to warm naturally before he shifted. He’d been burned at age fourteen, when a man his dad owed money to tossed a Molotov cocktail through Adam’s bedroom window. Apparently the man had mistakenly thought it was his dad’s room. Because he wasn’t old enough to shift, he’d had to go through painful skin graft treatments. By the time he was old enough to shift it was too late. His body hadn’t been able to heal the remaining damage.
He still had scars, and some of the muscles and tendons in his leg hadn’t healed right, so he was unable to run well in his shifted form. He had a limp in his human form as well. He’d never looked at his dad the same way again, and from the moment he’d been able to move out of the house, he hadn’t looked back.
Fortunately, his dad wasn’t part of the Wilde Creek pack any longer. Richard had moved back to his parents’ home pack, four hours south, to escape his debtors and start over. In the thirteen years since Adam had turned eighteen and moved out, he hadn’t seen his father once. He could stay the hell down there forever as far as Adam was concerned.
He closed his eyes at the burn as his skin stretched and made the change into his wolf. Waiting for the ache to ease, he lifted his muzzle and inhaled, sorting through the scents to see what lay in the darkness. In the distance he could hear members of his pack hunting, but he knew he was all alone in this large stretch of woods.
His wolf growled, happy to be let free. Adam gave in to the urge to hunt and took off in the direction of the nearest game. The February night air was cold and crisp, snow fluffing up around him as he moved. He thought about catching a few rabbits to take home and butcher to make stew and decided that was a good plan. He could take a batch over to Jeremiah and Honey to make up for his grumpy attitude earlier. Jeremiah had always been a good friend to him, and someday maybe Adam’s mate and Honey would become friends, too. If he ever found someone to call his own.
He hoped to fuck he would.
Shaking off his depressing thoughts again, he chided himself for letting his physical situation control his attitude. He normally wasn’t so moody, but he couldn’t seem to shake the melancholy tonight.
As he rounded a tree on the trail of a rabbit, he caught another scent on the night air and paused, his claws digging into the cold ground as he raised his muzzle. Something smelled like peppermint, and it made every protective and possessive instinct inside him roar.
With a warning snarl, he wheeled and moved as quickly as he could in that direction, the only thought on his mind a single, growled word:mine.
CHAPTERTWO
Dancer Grayson loved her adopted brother, Row, but he was a total downer sometimes. Always worried for her safety, never impulsive. Of course, it wouldn’t be good to havetwoimpulsive people right now—someone had to be the adult. Well, Dani was an adult, but Row was the moreadultieradult.
They’d been traveling for two days from their home in the bear sleuth to the last known whereabouts of a reindeer shifter herd. When she was found wandering alone in the woods at age three, Dani, a reindeer, had been adopted by Row’s mom Alice. She had very little memory of her parents and their herd, who had all been killed by natural coyotes. There were times when she ached for the camaraderie of her own kind, but despite being entirely different from her adopted mom and brother, she’d grown up in a very loving home. Alice was an amazing surrogate mother who had always treated Dani as her own, and Row was the best big brother around.
As Row filled the SUV with gas, she got out and stretched, complaining about the trip. To her dismay, her outdoors-loving brother had insisted they camp out at night. “Can we get a hotel at least once?”
“No.” Row shook his head. “After we find your people, then we’ll see, okay? We used to camp out all the time, when did you become such a priss about sleeping outside?”
She huffed indignantly. “I’m not a priss! It’s cold out. There’s snow! No one should camp when there’s snow. Plus, you snore.”
He grunted. “It’s plenty warm in the tent with the heater. And I don’t snore.”
The attendant gave Row change and Dani asked him, “Where are we?”
The human said, “Wilde Creek.”
Row asked, “Is there any place in town to get a meal?”
