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“Two runs around the territory?” he suggested.
“That works for me,” Gavin replied as he stripped.
Romeo shifted and stretched, his tail waving back and forth as his claws scraped on the concrete. Once Gavin had shifted, the two padded through the yard and into the woods, crossing through the dense forest until they reached the edge of the territory. They took off at a medium pace, not too slow so they were bored, and not too fast that they might miss something out of place or wrong.
As the cold night air whipped against his fur, Romeo settled into his beast and ran, hoping to tire himself out enough to rest.
* * *
Romeo woke abruptly,his mind spinning and his tiger ready to shift. His fangs had elongated and his claws had come out while he’d slept, which hadn’t happened to him since he was a teenager and still learning how to control his nature.
He sat up and saw he’d torn the blanket with his claws, shredding the soft material.
He’d been dreaming before he woke, a vivid dream featuring a female he was fairly certain he’d never met. Normally, his dreams, when he remembered them, tended toward his bloody past, a non-stop cycle ofyou’re a terrible person. Look what you’ve done.
But not this dream.
It was soft and warm, filling him with hope. He couldn’t remember the last time he was hopeful about anything.
He closed his eyes and replayed the dream in his mind. He’d been running through the woods, morning sunlight streaming through the trees. A female had been running ahead of him, her musical laugh leading him to follow her.
She hadn’t looked back at him, so he didn’t know what her face looked like. He only knew she had chestnut hair and a curvy frame. He’d been desperate to catch up to her in the dream, to hold her and find out what she looked like, but he hadn’t been able to reach her. In the final moments of the dream before he woke, he lost sight of her as she disappeared around a large tree.
He rubbed his chest where his heart still pounded, his claws and fangs receding as his beast settled down.
Who the hell was she?
ChapterThree
Ashley tucked her chestnut hair into a twist at the back of her head and selected a large clip from the makeup bag on the counter of the tiny two-bedroom home she’d been given to use. Unlike the mostly tiger Whisper Creek, Goshen was populated entirely by humans.
The interesting thing about shifter-heavy towns like Whisper Creek, which were founded and run by them, was that they were almost always surrounded by entirely human towns. She supposed it had to do with territories and hunting because multiple shifter groups wouldn’t want to share the same area to do their animal stuff, but she also thought it had to do with the ancient part of humans’ brains that told them to steer the hell away from shifters.
Except for the people who actually liked shifters. She’d been one of those people once upon a time. In her hometown, a small wolf pack was active in the community and friendly to everyone, whether they were shifters or not. Until that one night, when they’d been mostunfriendlyand Ashley had lost Kerry.
Shaking her head from the unwanted thoughts, she finished cleaning up from the long trip and headed out into the kitchen of the small rental home. Her phone buzzed as if the computer within the aluminum exterior had known she was in the room.
The screen read Boss.
Pressing the icon to answer, she hit the speaker button and bent to pick up her black tennis shoes.
“What’s up?” she asked.
“Are you in Whisper Creek yet?”
“No, it’s still light out.”
He let out an irritated grunt. “You need to be careful with the tigers. They’re tricky.”
Aw. He cared about her welfare. She was actually touched. Brent was not a man who liked to show emotion toward people, because he was always paranoid it would be used against him.
Then he quickly followed up the kind statement with, “I don’t want to have to train someone else to spy on them, you’re too valuable to me to do something stupid like get caught and slaughtered.”
Ah. Now that was the man she knew. He didn’t actually care about her, he cared about what she could do for him. Some people would hate that, would have walked away from the infuriating guy ages ago, but not her. She had used him to get revenge on the people who’d taken Kerry from her, despite her family’s protests to the contrary, and now he used her to drive shifters away from humans and send them back into the woods. Or the afterlife, whichever happened first.
“I’m always careful.”
She looked down at herself, smoothing her hands down the insulated long sleeved black shirt and grabbing the few things she was going to fill the cargo pockets with that were waiting on the counter.
