could see her face to witness firsthand the malice that had to be reflected in her eyes.
There were other curious particular details about her as well. Tess’s skin was paler than any outdoorswoman’s skin should have been. That little discrepancy seemed odd since she had to maintain her shape somehow and the great outdoors was her backyard.
Her shoulders were gracefully curved. Slender arms showed good muscle definition, as if she worked hard at something other than chasing Weres. Tess was visibly lean and fit. Too bad she wasn’t a Were, Jonas mused, because he appreciated her looks and could have made the most of them in other circumstances.
Lean, wiry, fierce females were his preference. Females who could hold their own and give back what they got. Females who didn’t usually bend unless they wanted to. He would have liked to run a palm over all that bare skin. Equally as pleasurable for him would have been to touch those silky golden tendrils currently hiding her face.
Wild was, after all, every werewolf’s middle name. In his twenty-eight years of dealing with his species, he had come to recognize the extremes of Were needs and wants...and tamp them down when he had to.
No such luck here, though.
Shaking his head scattered the impossible images taking shape in his mind. The only way he was going to touch Tess Owens would be in self-defense when she came at him with an intent to kill.
That was a shame because he knew instinctively that Tess Owens was something special and so much more than the reputation that preceded her.
He just couldn’t put a finger on how he knew this.
As his body shuddered with a mixture of appreciation and wariness for this new opponent, Jonas spoke softly so that Tess wouldn’t be able to hear what he had to say.
“Possibly that’s your greatest asset in dealing with my kind? We tend to underestimate you after a first glance? Pretty girl all alone in the woods?”
Inwardly, he also added, I vow not to become one of the suckers overly intrigued by those things. All I have to do is stay out of your way and hope you can determine friend from foe.
He prayed that Tess Owens might turn out to be an ask-questions-first kind of predator, just like he was. But this wasn’t the time for introductions and more wayward thoughts having to do with Tess’s tight jeans. Any hunter with a rep like hers wouldn’t let a full moon go to waste. Tess Owens would make the most of tonight and come knocking at his door fully armed and ready to rumble.
He had to keep her from doing so.
“I’m not what you think I am, Tess. I’m here, not to mess with you, but to protect a secret of my own. I’m needed. Someone else’s life depends on what happens here and what I do, and you just need to stay out of my way for a while.”
Did she get those confidences sent across the distance separating them? Jonas watched her turn her head as if she might have. He also felt a pull from somewhere behind him, an indication that he had to get back to his temporary home.
Having an Owens next door was one strike against him. The other creature that was looking for him was far worse.
Death was coming and would find him eventually. The black-cloaked, soul-catching bastard was the greater opponent, the mightier threat, and the monster he needed to keep at bay. Besides himself, there was only one member of the Dale family left, and his sister’s life depended on his ability to protect her. That had become his goal in life.
The bad news was the wave of aggression coming from Tess Owens and the silent words he swore he heard slip from her lips.
“It’s a date, wolf. Tonight. Don’t be late.”
At this point, so early in their association, probably nothing he could have said in return would have changed her mind.
Tess paced the room as night began to descend. Wearing leather pants, a black shirt and black boots, she took a quick look in the mirror to make sure she hadn’t forgotten anything that might make the difference between life and death when dealing with a werewolf.
She looked good enough, Tess thought, though people in town stared at her for other reasons when they met her. More than one of them had probably wondered where she might have gotten so many of the scars that crisscrossed the side of her face.
“Will he keep our date? What do you think, Tess?” she asked herself as she strode down the hallway of the cozy, eight-room, wood-paneled cabin.
Determined to find out the answer to that question, Tess entered the weapons room and chose a knife with a gleaming silver blade. She slung the bow and quiver of arrows over her shoulder, adjusting easily to the added weight, then rolled her neck to ease the tension building there.
Gloves on, weaponed up, she walked out of the front door. After giving the cabin a last glance, she set her sights on the trees and slipped into the dark.
* * *
“It’s okay.”
Jonas spoke softly to his sister, though he wasn’t sure how much of what he said ever sank in. There hadn’t been a verbal response from her since she had been attacked in a Miami park not too far from where they had lived.
Gwendolyn Dale had grown frail and lethargic on the outside—the parts others saw if they looked. He hoped the darkness he now sensed inside his sister would eventually fade away and be replaced by the happy-go-lucky sister he had always loved.
Sometimes, though, he wasn’t so sure about the darkness’s staying power.
Jonas tended to believe the attack in Miami had left Gwen with a black spot on her soul, and that she had been marked by Death in some way. This had to be the reason there seemed to be a specter on her trail. He thought it likely that his sister wasn’t supposed to have survived that attack, and that she had been slated, fated, or whatever the hell happened in the big cosmic scheme of things, to have died that night in Miami.
In the end though, what did he really know about such things? His entire repertoire of ideas was based on nothing more than conjecture and supposition.
“I have to go out, Gwen. Just for a while.”
Jonas laid a hand on his sister’s shoulder and winced at its thinness.
“I’ll be back soon, so take care while I’m gone and don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
Gwen would have laughed at the last part of that statement if she had been with him mentally as well as physically. Out of everyone else around them, his younger sister had been the most like him. She had been developing a similar kind of power and strength, even though neither of those things had helped the night she slipped out of the house with her friends without telling anyone and had encountered true darkness.
Gwen had been the only victim left alive out of the four young girls...if the term being alive could describe the state they had found her in. It had taken weeks of seclusion for her to recover enough to move her to this remote location. She hadn’t said a word to anyone since that terrible night.
Gwen
