like them, and he had a secret to guard.
The fact that he was one of more than two dozen werewolves in a tightly knit Miami pack wasn’t exactly something he could be open about, and it kept him from any real connection.
He glanced over his shoulder. Hell, he was fairly sure he remembered this woman’s name. Brenda? Brandi? Something starting with a B.
Maybe he was wrong about the B. Randi? Candy?
He might call her again sometime when he was lonely, even though they had nothing in common, really. It was dangerous for Weres to fraternize for too long or become regularly intimate with a species outside their own.
But available she-wolves were a rarity in Miami and tricky to be around due to that little phenomenon known as imprinting. A lingering meeting of the eyes, Were-to-Were, or one outstanding sexual climax between them, and a werewolf was as good as engaged.
“Do you want some?” his date asked, clinking glasses on the counter.
“No,” Rafe said. “You go ahead.”
A breeze had come off the ocean to ruffle his hair—hair that was too long for a cop and too short for Rafe’s taste. It was a good wind. Felt nice.
He closed his eyes.
The scent of lilac perfume preceded his date onto the balcony. “Nice view,” she observed.
“Yes,” he agreed. “I’m damn lucky to have it.”
He took in the long lines of towering hotels perched along the beach. Lights glistened on the water. Colorful umbrellas dotted the scene during the day. His place was the only remaining small, privately owned building among those multistoried stucco behemoths. A holdout. His refuge. The manager liked having a cop around.
“How much is the rent?” his companion asked, making conversation, interrupting Rafe’s communion with the darkness and the breeze. At this point in the evening he should have been paying more attention to the green lingerie, but he frowned.
Some little thing nagged at his consciousness, served to him on that wind. A new scent arrived that was hard to define with Brandi so close. It wasn’t salty ocean waves or the usual array of smells wafting in from the restaurants down the street. This was something else.
What?
Rafe’s pulse accelerated slightly as he caught and held a breath, searching for a way to reconcile the new scent with the sudden burning sensation at the back of his throat. He set down his drink and peered at the ocean, hoping to attach a name to what he couldn’t quite capture, though his unusual talent for identifying and categorizing problems was what had made him the youngest decorated detective in the Miami PD.
Not perfume, he decided. The incoming scent wasn’t floral. It couldn’t be the warning signal of a wolfed-up Were, since the moon wasn’t full tonight, and anyway, he was intimately familiar with the scents of his kind.
The way his body had automatically tensed suggested he would have to find a polite way to send the woman beside him on her way and find the source of the mysterious smell that had taken precedence over her lilac perfume. There was the slightest suggestion of danger in the other scent, and his innate sense of justice demanded he focus on tracking it down.
Mysterious scents were almost never good. More often than not, they were attached to trouble. Still, he actually would be sorry to see Brandi go when the night had been so promising. What male, human or Were, wanted to pass up such an opportunity?
He just had a bad feeling about what might be out there...and he couldn’t let it go.
* * *
Cara Kirk-Killion stared out the window of the black SUV, feeling anxious and trapped. She didn’t often leave her family’s secluded estate. She liked the freedom of open spaces, wind, trees and being alone to commune with those things...and all of that was about to end for a while. The SUV had already entered the city, which meant that she had less than ten minutes of freedom left.
She hated the promise she had made to her father to behave. It was time, he had said, for her to see more of the world...in moderation, and in carefully controlled circumstances. It wouldn’t do to turn her loose in Miami without strict supervision, she had heard the Elders say, and she understood the need for such precautions. So she was to see more of the world under the protection of one of the largest and strongest werewolf packs in Miami. Her father’s people...though they weren’t really people. They howled each time a full moon came around.
Every instinct at the moment, however, told Cara to run in the opposite direction. Seeing more of the world wasn’t necessary when deep down inside her so many worlds already existed. She hadn’t actually begun to believe she might be a freak until a week ago, when some Were Elders showed up and the plan to take her away became a reality.
That’s when the dreams began. And the lectures.
Cities were dangerous places, her father had warned, which was likely the reason her parents had hidden her and themselves in the country. Cara also got the impression that the Kirk-Killions wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else. Her family was different, and Cara hadn’t needed anyone to point that out.
Colton Killion’s body was covered with scars that no one ever spoke about, probably because his Were blood should have healed them. Her father’s hair was as white as his skin. He liked to roam in his wolfed-up shape and seldom came into the house. A pure white wolf. Lean. Strong. Fierce. Ghostly.
Her mother was neither human nor entirely wolf. Though she had been born a pure-blooded Lycan, it turned out that Rosalind Kirk also shared her blood and DNA with other types of beings. Her mother’s hair was sometimes as black as the night and at other times white. Her features had a tendency to rearrange on occasion, and her deceptively delicate body reeked of old power.
Her mother liked to disappear for hours and shape-shift when the moon was full so that she could run with the white wolf she had lived with for years. The eerie sounds Cara’s mother often made—not howls or growls, but something much more powerful—had echoed through Cara’s mind from the time she was born.
It hadn’t taken Cara long to realize that she also possessed some of her mother’s special traits, and that the Kirk-Killions might seem scary to the humans beyond their gates. Because of all that, her parents weren’t accompanying her to Miami. There were two strangers in the front seat of the SUV, and they refused to meet her inquisitive gaze.
Werewolves. Both of them. Half-breeds, in that unlike her, they had been human once. Cara smelled the old bites that had sealed their fates and inducted them into the moon’s cult a long time ago. They’d probably been warned about her being a freak of nature, and it crossed her mind that maybe she should give them a demonstration. Show her fangs. Bring out her wolf. Give them a thrill and make them turn back so that she could again plead her case for staying home.
She wasn’t actually going to do any of that. At eighteen years old, she was no longer a child. She could remain calm and follow the plan that had been made for her. She would try to behave, if only because her dreams had also pointed her this way...to Miami and what she might find there. Whom she might find there. The male who had been haunting her dreams lately and had contributed to her current state of restlessness. The guy who had destroyed whatever kind of peace she had been able to find with her unusual little family for the past few weeks.
If
