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Seduced by the Moon
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
Into the woods… Skylar Donovan comes to her late father’s Colorado cabin to find answers that explain his death. Instead, she meets a handsome Forest Ranger with a dark side, a stranger who appears in her dreams as something other than a man…Werewolf Gavin was bitten by a monster in the hills he has sworn to protect and has committed his life to searching for the beast. Now Gavin must protect Skylar from the evil he is stalking – but the forbidden lust that burns between them might be the greatest danger of all.
“Does the approach of a full moon make animals restless? I think I hear them at night,” Skylar said.
Now she was pushing things. She was an idiot.
Gavin came closer than she should have allowed and faced her squarely. He smiled, but with an expression of sadness. Heartbreaking sadness.
Why?
Whatever she had expected, it hadn’t been that.
As he slowly moved toward her, she felt every inch he traveled as if the air between them had been compressed. When he stopped, they were nearly chest to chest, and she had to look up to see his face.
Liquid lava coursed through her veins. She was hot enough to be combustible and was breathing hard … all these reactions serving to confirm that she hadn’t been wrong about one thing. Something was going on between them on a crazy personal level. Their chemistry had been instantaneous and impossible to ignore.
Animal magnetism taken to extremes.
Lust at first sight.
Dreams trespassing into the realm of reality.
LINDA THOMAS-SUNDSTROM writes contemporary and paranormal romance novels for Mills & Boon
Desire™ and Mills & Boon
Nocturne™. A teacher by day and a writer by night, Linda lives in the West, juggling teaching, writing, family and caring for a big stretch of land. She swears she has a resident Muse who sings so loudly, she often wears earplugs in order to get anything else done. But she has big plans to eventually get to all those ideas. Visit Linda at lindathomas-sundstrom.com (http://lindathomas-sundstrom.com) or on Facebook.
Seduced
by the Moon
Linda Thomas-Sundstrom
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
To my family, those here and those gone, who always believed I had a story to tell.
Contents
Cover (#u70474a0b-d1dd-586b-a16a-7d2949fb0016)
Introduction (#ue2330bc8-77a0-533c-a99c-2328fb2169ad)
About the Author (#ud8f9329c-c0c2-55ab-bb8c-c7a0d7a78b53)
Title Page (#u22fcf517-1472-5edf-a7c6-03530270ef66)
Dedication (#u683296e6-0f70-58eb-be7b-d475caebcc79)
Chapter 1 (#u7d7b4f63-9c07-507f-af72-ce58cb0a7302)
Chapter 2 (#u4447796d-9eb9-5c64-a3b3-d48af140cf5b)
Chapter 3 (#uc2348519-93ae-510c-b9c2-a95fe2af51c2)
Chapter 4 (#u829470d7-82aa-5a29-95bf-a87ebd5eff0d)
Chapter 5 (#u91544c47-056f-55a5-a195-463cf74eacf0)
Chapter 6 (#uecb034f8-924a-5c92-b410-5f5b2f463ddf)
Chapter 7 (#u2b3abd92-731e-52d0-ad82-46e81daf261b)
Chapter 8 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 9 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 10 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 11 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 12 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 13 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 14 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 15 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 16 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 17 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 18 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 19 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 20 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 21 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 22 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 23 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 24 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 25 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 26 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 27 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 28 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 29 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 30 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 31 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 32 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 33 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 34 (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 35 (#litres_trial_promo)
Extract (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter 1 (#ulink_9996bda7-af32-583f-b4b4-22620c99668e)
Skylar Donovan was being haunted by the same dream.
Four nights in a row.
An erotic, half awake, half asleep nightmare from which she awoke in tangled sheets, body slick with sweat, with her hand between her thighs.
Looked like nothing had changed tonight, either.
The minute Skylar closed her eyes, the dream returned. Moonlight lit the mountains. Shadows edged that light. And through the dark came the echo of a man’s voice: a mesmerizing wordless whisper that was the equivalent of a highly charged sexual invitation.
Her dream guy was there again. Hell, it was impossible to tune him out. The remote Colorado cabin she bunked in had no TV for white noise, and she’d left her headphones behind.
He called to her, and she responded to the raw sensuality in his voice. Though his words weren’t clear, his provocative tone left her ready to do something about the effect he had on her, whether he was real or not.
These damn dreams would have topped the charts as the best wet dreams ever...if it were an actual man she lusted for instead of a hallucination. Something her mind had created as a distraction from recent painful events. Everyone knew that fantasy was a notoriously viable way of coping with loss.
Problem was, this nighttime lustfest wouldn’t stop. Neither would the questions she didn’t dare acknowledge out loud.
Who was he?
What was he?
What would this creature’s skin feel like against her? How about his mouth? With a voice so totally seductive, surely the rest of him would be sublime.
Although Skylar knew the difference between dreams and reality, there were no clear-cut definitions here. With her eyes closed, she fell under his spell. His image stuck to her with supernatural glue.
Wide shoulders above a broad muscular chest. Thick torso. Narrow waist and hips. Dark hair worn long. His stance was determined, his face sometimes raised to the star-filled sky. And over everything was an aura of wildness that catapulted things into nightmare territory. Because there wasn’t the slightest chance of mistaking her nocturnal seducer for a normal human being. He was, in fact, anything but normal.
He was a magnetic combination of man and beast with a ridiculous twist on the DNA sequencing of two species that couldn’t share the same physical space in reality. A unique being with its own name.
Werewolf.
Hell. Yes. Werewolf.
With a presence powerful enough to sift through REM.
Of course these were just dreams. She got that. She wasn’t an idiot.
Well, maybe she was. Because...
She was so very hot for the creature that stood on that hilltop and looked like a man at times, though that outline was deceptive. She felt vulnerable when he was around, and slightly out of control. But maybe she was only an eavesdropper, and he waited for someone else. Something else.
Was the moon his mistress? Wasn’t that how things worked for werewolves?
Why, then, was he yanking her chain?
A sudden spike in her heart rate, far beyond the usual range, jolted Skylar’s eyes open. Anxious, she rolled over on the mattress and sat up, sweat trickling between her breasts, heart pounding too damn fast.
Tonight was different somehow. This time the voice had seemed closer and very, very real. It left an echo in the room.
Not dreaming now?
To prove that, Skylar slipped from the bed and padded to the window. She moved the curtain, expecting to catch sight of her velvety tormentor, wondering again why she allowed a figment of her imagination to continue to interrupt what should have been a good night’s sleep.
She saw nothing out there, but God, had she actually expected to?
Resisting the urge to laugh at herself, Skylar rested her forehead on the cool window glass. Probably she had allowed her mind to supercharge some poor nocturnal creature’s cry into something it wasn’t. That’s all those sounds were.
Not a voice.
She wasn’t nuts, just tired, worn out and sleep deprived. She also supposed that these nighttime escapades could be tied to the power of suggestion, caused by the discovery of her dad’s cache of items in the attic. That old trunk and the things she found inside it.
Her dad, it seemed, kept dirty little secrets to himself here in Colorado, so far away from his family. And it had taken coming to this remote cabin to go through his things for Skylar to realize she hadn’t really known David Donovan at all.
One more glance outside, at the night, and she turned back to the bed. Curling up on the mattress with her knees to her chest, she used her usual abundance of common sense to reason things out.
Maybe dreaming about a supernatural lover merely showcased a healthy need to get past the termination of her relationship with Danny, her ex-fiancé. She had left him a couple of months ago, before actually getting to the altar, and everybody needed time to adapt.
It wouldn’t take a professional opinion to point out that the sexy dreams she seemed committed to having could be her mind’s way of filling the void made by that kind of change, especially since it was followed fairly closely by her father’s untimely death...
The father who, as a famous psychiatrist dealing in other peoples’ problems, had, it turned out, sometimes dabbled in his own world of make-believe.
