out of options. It would have been useless to try to outrun a strong male when chasing prey is what they did so well, and this guy’s presence alone had nearly knocked her off her feet. There hadn’t been time to find cover after her initial awareness of him. Currently, she stood in the open, completely exposed.
Why don’t you come out?
Are you toying with me?
At that moment, Abby hated the moonlight that ruled these beasts more than ever. She hated everything about the moon.
Shit. How far was she from help?
She’d been cornered between two of the walls separating one of Miami’s megamansions from the east end of the park. Although she had been in worse places numerous times, being stuck in the open and drenched in moonlight didn’t help her chances.
Attached to her leg, above her right boot, a knife rested in its sheath. Her cell phone was keyed to her father and the rest of his hunters waiting for news at her father’s bar. Short of using the blade, throwing the phone at a beast in man form would be an unconscionably girlie thing to do.
For the record, I haven’t been that kind of girl for some time now, she wanted to shout.
“Damn moon. I hate you.”
“In that case, this is probably the last place you’d want to be tonight,” a deep masculine voice returned from the shadows.
Contact.
He had spoken out loud.
Pulses of pure adrenaline, fierce and feral, skittered through Abby, producing a series of massive electrical jolts. Her stomach twisted into knots. Her teeth slammed together. Staring at what stepped out from under the trees, her hands flew to her neck in an automatic gesture of self-defense, as if in man form or not, her visitor might go for her jugular.
And God help her, part of her untimely inertia was due to the fact that her impression of this guy, from afar, hadn’t been wrong.
This sucker was one hundred percent intimidating.
Abby stared in shocked silence as the Were in his human incarnation advanced in a balanced combination of hard angles and mounds of lean muscle.
He stood tall enough to tower over her, and was twice as broad. A first glance proved him to be brutally handsome. His energy was electrifying. Looking at him kicked the scalding Miami summer temperature up several notches and turned her shudders seismic. Her heartbeats thundered in a way that any Were worthy of its species would be attracted to.
Searching, she saw nothing wolfish in his outline, though an aura of Otherness radiated from him like visible radio waves. His casual, almost nonchalant stride screamed of combustible energy tightly contained in a human casing. His long limbs and wide shoulders were topped by a tanned sculpted face and thick chin-length hair that fell somewhere on the color spectrum between gold and bronze.
Oh yes. This guy was a breed unto himself, and completely unlike anything she had come across before. He was a magnetic combination of rugged and elegant.
Too gorgeous to be human.
He wore a blue long-sleeved shirt rolled at the cuffs to expose sun-kissed forearms. An open collar showed off more skin. His jeans were faded, and she caught a flash of heavy black boots, though he advanced soundlessly with his gaze riveted to her.
Abby felt color drain from her face. Mesmerizing wasn’t the word to best describe him. Magnificent seemed a better choice. Also deadly. This beast, with his incredibly honed body outlined by the tight, fitted shirt, moved toward her little circle of light with the grace of an animal...because he was an animal, at least in part. And the overtly masculine, almost hypnotic physical details that described him were likely some kind of built-in bait for reeling in prey.
The devil always lay in the details. Her father had warned her about this many times.
Never get close to the enemy.
Hell, she’d just smashed that golden rule to smithereens through no fault of her own.
Beneath her outward quakes, Abby’s insides trembled with a mixture of fear and defiance and something else she didn’t dare address—that new thing that had no business showing up alongside this large golden wolf.
Hunger.
That’s what she felt. Hunger. For knowledge of him. For the chance to get closer to him.
Either she’d gone insane, or this guy had the ability to hypnotize her with his wolf power, because she grappled with a spectacularly idiotic, completely suicidal compulsion to have the itch forming down deep inside her scratched by a razor-sharp claw.
The breath she exhaled after holding it for so long was steamy. Aside from her need for self-preservation, and against her better judgment, this werewolf in his human form affected her in ways that were totally wrong. The highly erotic vibrations he gave off were the epitome of a perilous death trap.
She got that. She knew better. So why did her body want to meet the animal in him? What possible explanation could account for her absurd desire to fold herself into his heat?
“What do you want?” she demanded in frustration.
He replied in a voice like soft, sifted gravel. “I was wondering if perhaps you have a death wish.”
The world went white-hot beneath this Were’s unwavering gaze. Moonlight seemed to amplify every sensation rippling through Abby, all of those sensations pointing to him. No doubt about it, her sexually suggestive reactions were as dangerous as the Were himself.
She’d never been an out-and-out rebel, really, she thought now, though she had lived on the edge, more or less fending for herself since her mother died of a prolonged illness when she was a kid. In the past, she’d had no reason to flaunt her father’s strict authority, since he had provided, if not earnest affection, a roof over her head.
So, was there an actual rule about people having to do the right thing at the right time, or only what was good for them?
Breathlessness made her light-headed, a symptom of anticipating more trouble to come. Needing air, unable to stand the silence, Abby spoke in a voice shakier than she would have liked, given that werewolves, as with other predators, could ferret out fear.
“Death wish?”
He nodded. “Everyone in Miami is familiar with this park’s unfavorable mortality statistics.”
Inner warning signals went off again. Red flags waved. If she couldn’t outrun this sucker and he wished her harm, she’d have to fight.
Keep him talking. Gauge his intent.
Was he a member of the pack killing people out here? The way he rolled his shoulders reminded Abby of how much muscle lay under that cool blue cotton, and how that muscle would soon adapt to a new shape. If not an organic werewolf, known from Sam’s lectures as a Lycan, he’d have to have been bitten by
