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Werewolves were his idea, after all.
Not only had her dad believed those creatures existed, he must have thought they roamed the mountains of Colorado, right outside this cabin’s door—which was likely the reason he often retreated here under the premise of needing alone time.
Beasts, for God’s sake.
Like the one in my dreams.
So maybe fantasies were contagious and could be inherited, and stumbling on her father’s secrets had spawned her own nocturnal reveries.
Skylar pulled the blanket up to her neck. Seconds later, she flipped onto her back, staring at the ceiling of the small rustic bedroom.
“Screw the pity party,” she murmured. Because truthfully one thing, at least, was clear. She felt liberated by the empty spot on her ring finger.
Seeking comfort in the lavender-scented feather pillow, Skylar vowed to stick to her plan: finish going through and packing up her father’s things and then return to her apartment in Miami, where her wedding dress still hung on a hanger. The dress would have to be returned eventually. If she ran into Danny, she’d just have to deal.
She could do that.
In truth, her life sucked sometimes. No mother, no father and no fiancé...but what the heck? She had three loving sisters and the deed to this cabin.
“Bring it on, sexy nightmare!”
Plumping up the pillow, Skylar blew out a breath and dared to close her eyes. Refusing to behave, her heart spiked again.
Swear to God, she was sure the man in her dreams was out there now, waiting for her. Whispering to her. Compelling her to listen.
And why the hell shouldn’t she?
* * *
Gavin Harris turned his face to the night wind, catching a whiff of a fragrance completely foreign to the rest of the forest smells surrounding him. It was a sudden sensory bombardment that didn’t belong here and was, even as he breathed it in, a detour from his agenda.
Eyes shut, he wrapped his senses around the uniqueness of the rich, sweet scent, separating each component with his fine-tuned wolf senses.
Female, he concluded. Young, supple flesh. Musky pheromones. Traces of soap and denim. Tantalizing feminine scents that weren’t in any way related to the more monstrous odors he sought tonight, but were oh so compelling.
He shook his head hard to ward off the distraction, and muttered, “Forget it.” Investigating the source of these new smells would mean detouring from his objective, which had to remain his greatest priority. He was on watch, hunting his own version of big game.
That objective was an important one. Vital.
But damn...
The rosy feminine perfume floating to him from the cabin in the clearing below him caused a visceral physical reaction similar to being shocked by a cattle prod. All the little hairs on his arms stood up. Tingling nerves made his muscles twitch.
He smelled the woman in that cabin as easily as if she stood in front of him, in person.
And she was alone.
Stepping forward brought the cabin into view through a gap in the trees. Gavin leveled his gaze on the dark windows and inhaled deeply, concluding that the woman down there was the only human in the area at the moment. She occupied a cabin that had been originally been built by old Tom Jeevers, making it smell a whole hell of a lot better than its line of former occupants had.
Something else?
The agitated, tinnier scent of anxiousness wafted to him, adding a second, spicier layer to the woman’s floral bouquet. Either she was anticipating something, or was in some kind of trouble. A fight with a companion, lover or husband, maybe, that caused a ruffle in the atmosphere? The long-anticipated arrival of a lover who was late?
“Lucky bastard,” Gavin muttered. If she had a husband, that guy would get to smell her every damn day.
With a quick glance up at the sky, Gavin widened his stance, knowing he shouldn’t linger too long in the moonlight. Though the moon wasn’t completely full tonight, that bugger was close enough to that phase to affect him in adverse ways. All the enhanced senses were just a start.
A quick glance down the length of his body found it not actually foreign, but increasingly unfamiliar as each lunar phase progressed. The extra muscle that he hadn’t worked out in a gym to maintain helped to add bulk. His height had stretched a good inch or two above his normal six-one.
His jeans were tighter. Shirts now strained at the seams. The only measurements remaining the same were his feet, slammed into his boots.
Then there was his hair. The tangle of chin-length waves were darker and much longer than he was used to, tickling his ears, making him wonder how long he’d been patrolling this section of the mountain ignoring most of the perks of civilization.
Could it have been two years?
Damn if everything hadn’t changed in the span of those years. Out of necessity, he’d pretty much become a loner. And though he patrolled this area of the Rockies regularly, during those past two years four people had died. One of them was the last man to occupy the cabin now emitting a woman’s enticing pheromones.
Oh, yes. And within those two years he, Gavin Harris, Colorado Forest Ranger, had regrettably, unforgettably, become a beast tethered by a silver chain to the devilish disk in the sky. Moon. As absurd as that seemed.
He closed his eyes again, shook his head. Having a woman down there, so very close, and smelling like heaven, served to highlight his shitload of personal issues.
People who abused the clichéd phrase no crying over spilt milk had never experienced their skin turning inside out or their muscles expanding to nearly twice their size in the span of sixty seconds. They’d never felt the pain of fingers splitting open to spring a full set of razor-sharp claws, and a jaw disconnecting bone by bone.
After taking another deep breath, Gavin dropped to a crouch. The sultry smells floating upward from the cabin were disturbing to him for so many reasons. One major problem was that they could easily mask the other, more feral odor he’d been out here searching for.
The woman’s presence was trouble, any way he looked at it, and also a reminder he didn’t need about the better times in his past. And the woman in that cabin might be in danger out here from bigger, badder things than him.
Who are you? he wondered. Hasn’t anyone warned you about this place? Told you that four deaths in and around the area are four too many, and that a woman by herself might be asking for trouble?
Determined to let this go, Gavin straightened and half turned. That woman wasn’t his problem. He had more serious things to worry about. There was a damn good possibility he wasn’t the only monster nearby, and if that theory proved true, odds were less than good that he’d ever see another sunrise.
“Leave her alone. Get out of here. Let her be,” Gavin warned himself.
Not so fast...
An additional beam of light drew his gaze.
He turned back.
The cabin’s door opened, throwing a narrow strip of yellow across the boards of the covered porch. A figure emerged to stand in that beam, and although the features were shadowy from this distance, Gavin’s heart exploded in a flurry of racing beats.
The woman stood in the open doorway as if his thoughts had drawn her out. As if she knew he was there, watching her, and felt his presence.
Seeing her jolted the beast inside him.
He’d been right about this woman. Anxiousness rode the breeze. She was tense, uptight and high-strung, like an animal about to spring.
But she was also small, blonde, and only half-dressed.
Gavin stared at the half-dressed part, and the long, lean, very bare legs that melted into delicate ankles and shoeless feet.
His inner wolf gave a soft, muted whine that scattered when he cleared his throat.
Christ, temptation was a bitch.
So was being a goddamn werewolf.
As for you, woman...
His attention snapped to identify another smell.
Metal.
The woman on the porch had a gun?
Gavin realized with a sudden flash of intuition that the icy chill now ripping through him wasn’t due only to the alluring sight of the woman, or the scent of her weapon, but to the thing closing in on them from the mountain.
He must have gauged the strange lure of this area correctly if the prodigal beast he sought returned two days early. Forty-eight hours shy of that next full moon.
“Ah, hell...”
With renewed wariness, he glanced again at the cabin and the beauty on the porch whose white T-shirt highlighted her slender torso, and whose face was hidden by a cloud of fair hair. He already felt protective of her. Felt as though he knew her somehow.
She might have courage enough to try to protect herself, but no gun he knew of would save her if the thing he chased turned its attention her way. He whirled, his boots digging up clumps of dirt. No time to waste. If the visitor heading this way was what he hoped it might be, he needed to lead that abomination away from the cabin.
With a final look over his shoulder, Gavin took off at a jog because his gut told him he needed to stop this killer before it claimed another poor soul.
Chapter 2 (#ulink_41d2a9f4-8e43-54ea-87fa-0ed8f96a310c)
Although no one showed up to confront her as she stood on the porch, Skylar knew she was no longer alone, and that she wasn’t dreaming this time. Not a chance in hell.
Her father’s gun felt heavy and cold in her hands. It was loaded, and she knew how to fire, just as all the Donovan girls did. Their father had been diligent about his daughters’ self-defense.
That didn’t stop the shaking, though. She had to hold the gun with both hands as she faced the unknown. Someone was out there. This was real. And at this time of night, that felt like bad news.
Of course, it could be a lost hiker. Maybe it was her father’s crusty caretaker coming by to check on the property, or out for a late-night stroll. But the persistent flush of internal heat told her that those possibilities were false and that someone else was here.
Instead of retreating inside and locking the door behind her, Skylar stood her ground, scanning the night beyond the meager pool of porch light where evidence of a visitor lay in the sudden silence of insects.
Biting her lip hard enough to taste blood, she ventured a call. “Where are you? Who are you?”
The silence was unnerving. She worked at drawing a breath.
“Not going to show yourself? I’m here, waiting.” She pointed the revolver at the trees on the hillside, upped her volume. “And I’m not happy about it.”
The taunt produced no results, but she couldn’t give up. Someone was there, somewhere. What if it wasn’t some innocent hiker? Suppose her father’s killer had returned?
She had to consider that possibility. She refused to believe that her diligent, first-rate climber dad might have fallen to his death. The conclusion she’d come to, independent of her sisters’ opinions, was that if David Donovan had fallen, someone must have pushed him.
“So who are you? Have you come for me?” she said to the quiet night, getting nothing back. No response at all.
“No time for hide and seek,” she called out in a last-ditch effort to make contact as she backed up slowly, crossing the threshold in a shuffle of bare feet.
A change in the air made her pause. Moving the gun, she refocused her aim on a point just south of the path up the hillside.
“Best to stay inside,” a man’s voice advised from somewhere near the closest trees. “And lock the door. It might also be a good idea to leave here tomorrow.”
Skylar’s heart skidded over one too many beats, leaving her breathless. “Who are you?” she called out.
“Ranger, patrolling the area. There’s been some trouble around here.”
She waved the gun. “I know that, and I know how to use this.”
“Better to move on before you have to use it,” he said. “A woman alone is far too tempting as a target.”
“How do you know I’m alone?”
“It’s my business to know who’s in the area.”
“You’ve been watching the cabin?”
“As much as I can, but right now I’m needed elsewhere.”
“Where’s your car, or whatever rangers use to get around in?”
“Over the hill behind me.”
“You run around on foot in the dark?”
“There aren’t too many paths worthy of a vehicle around here, beyond the main road.”
“I don’t need you to stand guard,” Skylar said. “Thanks, but you can get on with your business.”
“Fine. Just offering a friendly warning. Can’t be too careful this far out of town.”
Skylar waved the gun again. “I’m well aware of that.”
“Well, good night, then,” the invisible ranger, if that’s what he really was, said.
“Good night,” Skylar echoed.
The night air changed again, rearranging itself as though something heavy had been removed and the darkness filled in the vacuum left behind. The result was a powerful charge that left Skylar swaying on her feet.
This could have been her imagination, she supposed as she shrugged off a new round of chills. But one thing was clear. She had no doubt whatsoever that this ranger’s voice was the voice from her dreams.
The same damn one.
She’d bet her life on that.
