Читать книгу Wolf Hunter - Linda Thomas-Sundstrom, Linda Thomas-Sundstrom - Страница 9

Chapter 3

“What the...?”

Cameron Mitchell took a good look at the woman standing before him and frowned. She was within touching distance, and he hadn’t put her there. The woman had gotten right up in his face.

Her actions were a complete surprise, and not wholly unwelcome. His feelings for her had come on strong from the first glance, and as unlikely as it seemed, her feelings appeared to parallel his. Still, acting on those feelings would be a huge mistake.

They were strangers, talking because of the way these immediate attractions went. Though the urge to touch her was impossible to resist, and he didn’t want to resist, he did have to maintain control. She wasn’t the reason he patrolled the park, and was, in the end, a distraction.

Still, his groin ached over the lushness of her scent. The inhuman parts of him swirled in reaction to the way she licked her lower lip after speaking, with the tip of a small pink tongue. Looking at her made the wildness trapped inside him long for release, and there was only one way to solve that problem.

Crazy woman! She telegraphed her willingness to break down barriers in a way that even the dullest senses could have picked up on. But the heat signature that had drawn him to her in the first place would also be a homing beacon for other Weres in the area, and a lightning rod for lunatics.

He couldn’t have her. The sooner she got out of range, the better. He had to let her go. Discounting others in the area, there was no way to predict what might happen if he acted on his sudden addiction to her, or if she might end up getting hurt. Though his wolf wasn’t in charge tonight, it hovered close enough to be in favor of taking this opportunity.

And the wolf’s motives, he had discovered, were unreliable.

Hell, woman, I could be one of those criminals. I could be lethal.

She had to know how easily she could be overpowered by a larger source. Surely she understood that this park was off-limits for a reason. She had confessed to knowing the awful statistics.

She eyed him keenly in return with an intelligent emerald-green gleam that suggested she was no fool. Her defiant stance lent her a certain air of capability. Yet she had been alone at night in a place where no other human dared to trespass. This meant no one would probably be coming to her rescue, and that if he desired to give in to the force of his rising libido, she’d be his for the taking.

He put a hand to his forehead, hoping to stall those thoughts, and posed a string of silent questions.

Why are you here?

Why this odd attraction?

Unable to help himself, he studied her.

For all her defiant attitude, she was small. He topped her by a full head or two. She had a hard-muscled sensuality that cut into him as though she had wielded the blade near her boot—the blade that sang to him of its presence as if it were alive.

She wasn’t a classic beauty or the stuff most men couldn’t forget after a first glimpse. No hourglass curves, big breasts or blond curls. Lean, taut arms were exposed by a sleeveless black shirt. Baggy cargo pants hid the sculpted lines of her legs. Straight, shoulder-length hair, a brilliant shade of auburn with purposefully dyed dark black tips, seemed to him an edgy color combination.

She moved again, closer.

Damn her.

Her fragrance intensified, filling his lungs with each breath he drew in. Every woman had her own unique smell, but this one...this one smelled like candy.

One touch. Only one.

He pressed his palm to her cheek and waited to see her reaction. Her eyes blazed. His own reaction wasn’t so simple. The beast inside him began to unfurl, adding depth to his illicit desire to possess her. His need to circumvent control began at a cellular level and dug in deep.

“Don’t you get it? I can be dangerous,” Cameron said to her. “There’s something about you.”

She did not reply. How could she, after that confession?

Neither did she run.

Which made matters worse.

Her skin felt like velvet, an intoxication that streaked through him. The fact that he hadn’t been with a woman for a long time came home to haunt him. He hadn’t indulged since the damn gangbanger he’d been cuffing in a raid bit him, changing his life forever.

I’m in control. I can do this. Stay firm and see to her safety.

He chanted that silent internal directive several times before deciding that she had to do the moving. He couldn’t be trusted. Not completely. Not so close to a full moon.

How do I make you go? Scare you? Be the bully you had expected me to be? Maybe another touch will frighten you into doing the right thing.

Testing that theory, Cameron let his open hand linger on her cheek, almost able to hear time ticking away. Yet she didn’t take him up on the invitation of a hasty retreat.

He felt so damn beastly.

A roar of conquest rumbled in his chest as his heart changed rhythm to adapt to hers, lifting and falling in a series of vertical spikes. With utmost willpower, he fielded an oncoming rush of adrenaline.

The nameless woman’s legs were apart, with her feet planted. She had fisted her hands at her sides. Her teeth were clenched. But in her eyes lay another kind of unspoken invitation.

When his fingers slid slowly downward, she flinched as if she’d been stung, and blinked slowly. The level of her defiance in the face of rules governing two strangers meeting in dangerous places made his needs escalate. Cops were adrenaline junkies out of necessity, but this situation flowed out of the box. He was hot for her and wanting closeness. Any kind of closeness.

A growl erupted from his throat unchecked. Hell, he hadn’t meant to do that.

The woman beside him swayed in reaction to the sound. Her delicate face lost some of its color. Long lashes fluttered. Her chest rose and fell quickly with each new breath. But she stood there with her pulse racing hard enough to lift the skin beneath her right ear, movement that caused the two small diamond studs in her lobes to sparkle.

When she finally moved, it was in a way Cameron truly hadn’t expected. She stepped closer, pressing her chest to his, her hips to his. Suggestively.

Her eyes were on the top button of his shirt. She kept her gaze there while her body telegraphed quite clearly what she expected to happen.

Cameron swore. Restraining himself took real effort and came close to being the hardest thing he had ever attempted, after being a cop for five long years. More than anything, he wanted to throw her on the ground and prove just how dangerous he could be. His wolf liked the idea.

“You haven’t gone,” she said, speaking now through seductively moist parted lips.

“Neither have you.” The blood in his veins thrashed, racing toward the places already erect and ready for action.

“I’m thinking about going,” she said.

“Maybe you should think harder.”

She shook her head. “My advice to you is to take it or leave it before I change my mind.”

Another streak of heat tore through Cameron, magnified by surprise. What had she just said?

She had no qualms about this? About sex with a stranger who could have been anyone, and was, in actuality, so much more?

“I don’t know what game you’re playing, or what you’re up to,” he said, “but I just told you I never accost women in dark places, and I wasn’t lying.”

“Okay. Leave it, then.”

Cameron stared down at her, his stability tumbling. Finding this female had temporarily taken his mind off pressing problems. Imagining what he’d like to do to her was a luxury. But finding her alone in this park on a night like this—especially on a night like this—made all those sinful thoughts unacceptable.

Several gangs called this place their home turf. The whole area stank of wolf gone mad, and those mindless badasses, minus the fur, were out tonight and always up to no good. No werewolf could resist the play of moonlight so near to a full. He hadn’t been able to ignore it.

He could barely ignore this, or her.

Despite his eagerness, and after a monk-like few months, mating with this woman, on this spot, just wasn’t possible. He was what he was, and had been for a while. Wolf particles had been introduced to his bloodstream, creating and sealing a wolf to his system, leaving him unstable.

It had taken days of severe agony in order to recover from the initial nightmare of the bite that had made him a hybrid. In his mind, the image of the hyped-up bastard that had chomped on his arm remained fixed.

He might have lost his mind completely for a few of those terrible days afterward. Nothing of that existed now, other than the brief remembrance of uttering prayers about needing to be put out of his misery.

Yet he had survived. And closeness to others had become impossible, at home and at work. He stopped returning the stares from women on the street, and made no dates. He quit having drinks after-hours with the guys on his beat. All that withholding was paramount, and out of necessity, until he found out as much as he could about his present state, and about the control necessary to maintain it.

He existed now in werewolf infancy, with no way to anticipate what might happen if his emotions got involved. What if he hurt a woman by accident?

So you, he wanted to say to the female with the shining green eyes, are the ultimate temptation.

Until he knew everything, and maybe not even then, he wasn’t relationship material. And it was a given that a one-nighter with a pretty woman in a notoriously feral park wasn’t a win-win for anybody, under any circumstances. This close to a full moon, any thought to the contrary would be pure lunacy.

If you knew what resides at my core, Green Eyes, and what I have become, you would run off, screaming.

I hate what the moon does to people, she had said.

Those words still echoed in his mind.

Its beauty is deceitful, she’d said.

Looking at her now, he wanted to say, If you only knew what deceit actually is.

His wolf stirred, raising goose bumps on the back of Cameron’s neck. The wolf was searching for an early way out. This wolf, Cameron feared, might want to bite somebody back.

Oh yes, I want you, both man and wolf agreed when eyeing this woman, though in spite of the physical need pounding through him, he had told this woman he was a gentleman.

No joke.

Still, he had to admit that she possessed a streak of wildness unlike anything he’d encountered in a female, and this sparked his pleasure buttons. Part of him voted to take her up on her offer of closeness. Heck, most parts did. He was hard in all the right places and aching to act.

Didn’t everyone need company on a dark summer night?

Even a monster?

As the scent of female hormones floated in the moonlight, Cameron’s heart thundered. Her face was dewy, and enticingly damp. The slightest flush of pink had returned to her cheeks. Those large emerald eyes, slowly lifting to the level of his neck, his jaw, and continuing upward, were wide open. Her generous lips opened as if she’d say something else or take back what she’d said about him either taking her up on her offer, or leaving it.

He almost wished she would take all this back.

Cameron ran his hand over her black T-shirt, his heated palm sliding slowly from the rounded collar to the swell of her breasts. The shirt was thin. He felt her fullness as if there were nothing between his hand and her skin. And indeed, she was lacking undergarments that would have taken precious time to remove.

The raised buds of her nipples were an erotic discovery and a telling symptom of her heightened state of arousal. She was exotic, narcotic, and had become his drug of choice on a moon-filled night.

After all, the whole gentleman thing only went so far.

The sting in his fingertips announced the closeness of claws that had no business intruding on tonight. A ghostly shudder of lengthening ligaments tickled Cameron’s spine as his baser side pined for release, when in reality, he and the wolf were one, and inseparable.

The feisty woman’s heart beat frantically beneath his hand. She dripped with the same moonlight that would soon issue a command for him to trade one shape for another, and the light made her features appear more angular, and riddled with shadows. She was moonlight personified...and he was going to use her. Because, swear to God, she looked as if she could handle what he wanted to do to her, and like it.

Stroking upward from her breast, wedging himself tighter against her, Cameron allowed the beastly cravings some room, just this once, and angled his ravenous mouth toward hers.