heart pounded with a healthy dose of adrenaline, but not outright fear. She’d had to contend with two older brothers growing up. Wrestling over one thing or another had been a daily sport and they hadn’t given her any slack just because of her gender.
She wiggled one arm free, sharpened her elbow and jammed it into his solar plexus. An audible gasp filled her ear. His hold loosened. Falling away, he snatched the tails of her sweater.
With a resounding oomph, he hit the carpeted floor, flat on his back with Angeline sprawling on top of him. Immediately, his meaty arms caged her, then rolling her beneath him, he pinned her with his weight.
“I can’t breathe!” At least not all that well.
Hands flat against his muscled chest, damp from sweat, Angeline shoved hard but nothing happened. Pushing over a concrete wall might’ve been easier than getting the wolfan male to budge.
“Who are you?” Though he allowed her some wiggle room, the timbre of his growl gave grave warning.
“The woman who will unman you if you don’t get the hell off me!” Angeline scraped her nails down his taut abdomen to the waistband of his boxers. Odd, considering wolfan males didn’t care to wear men’s underwear. But it was winter and she was grateful that his bare ass hadn’t christened her new couch.
The undergarment, however, didn’t prevent her from gripping his heavy sack in a manner any man would recognize as anything but playful.
A painful snarl parted his lips. Each time she squeezed, his lids shuttered and his gaze became more focused and alert. She knew the moment his brain recognized that he was crouched intimately above a female whose body was perfectly aligned with his.
“Think carefully about your next move, Dogman.”
“Oh, I’m not moving, Angel,” he said calmly. Clearly. Seductively. “Not until you let go of my balls.”
“Good,” she said, ignoring the flutter in her stomach that his deep, quiet Texas drawl had started to stir. “Now that you’re awake, do you know where you are?”
A whisper of a smile curved his mouth. “In heaven.” Eyes drifting closed, he lowered his face to hers and rubbed his check against her jaw, snuffling her hair. “God, you smell divine.”
Despite the awkward circumstance, Angeline didn’t sense any threat in his manner. The reverent way he breathed in her scent seemed almost like an act of worship.
His clean male musk invaded her senses, sparking a primal interest better left dormant.
“All right. The sniff feast is over.” She squeezed his sack.
Once she had his full attention again, Angeline let go.
He eased off her and she sat up, watching him hoist himself onto the couch. Only then did she realize that most of his left leg was missing. She also noticed the scattered scars on his arms and torso. Some new, others quite old.
Her heart pinched but she wouldn’t allow sympathy to fester. She had no business feeling anything for a Dogman.
Leaning down, he picked up the blanket that had slid to the floor during their struggle and folded it. “Apologies for the intrusion, Angel.”
“My name isn’t Angel. It’s Angeline.” She sank into the oversize chair. “That was some nightmare you were having when I came home. Have those often?”
“Every time I fall asleep.”
No wonder his eyes looked weary, and wary and sad.
“And why are you sleeping on my couch, Dogman?”
“I prefer Lincoln,” he said quietly. “Tristan left the wrong key beneath the doormat. When I called, he said you wouldn’t mind if I crashed here. Clearly, he made a mistake.” He removed a nude-colored stocking from the oversize duffel bag. Grimacing, he began stretching it over his naturally bronze stump.
Angeline folded her arms over her chest, hoping he didn’t notice her weakness, a traitorous heart that tweaked because of the traumatic loss he had suffered. “Tristan should’ve warned me.”
If he had, she might’ve refused.
Watching Lincoln pull the state-of-the-art prosthetic leg from his duffel, guilt stabbed at her conscience. He would only be in town a few weeks. She could grit her teeth and be neighborly for that long, couldn’t she?
Half naked and legless wasn’t how Lincoln had imagined meeting his guardian angel in the flesh. Angeline’s long auburn hair framed a face Lincoln would have recognized even if he were a blind man with only his hands to feel the shape of her feminine brow, her high, angular cheeks and soft, full lips. God only knew how often he had traced every angle and plane of the woman in the worn photograph he’d carried with him for the better part of the last fifteen years. Now that he’d encountered the she-wolf in the flesh, his heart wouldn’t stop fluttering and the tingly sensation in his stomach would make him sick if it didn’t stop soon.
Attaching the prosthetic to his stump, Lincoln didn’t dare take his gaze off Angeline, fearing she would disappear like she had so often in his dreams.
The old picture entrusted to him by the dying Dogman on Lincoln’s first mission hadn’t done Angeline justice because it had failed to capture her fire and strength of will. Unlike the fragile, ethereal female he’d envisioned, the real woman—strong, sassy, sexy—took him utterly by surprise.
“When is the last time you ate?” Despite the gentleness in her voice, Angeline’s hard, no-nonsense gaze didn’t soften.
“On the plane, somewhere over the ocean,” he said over the loud rumblings of his stomach. Grabbing his camo pants, he stuffed his good leg into the pant leg and then slid the other pant leg over his prosthetic without embarrassment over his nearly nude state. For Wahyas, nudity was as natural as eating and breathing.
“I’m coming off a ten-hour flight from Munich. I got stuck in customs for over two hours in the Atlanta airport because the TSA agents had never seen the bionics used in my leg. Then I had a nearly three-hour drive to get here and all of the drive-throughs in town were closed.”
He wouldn’t starve, though. Inside his duffel were the rations he’d consumed for so long that he no longer remembered the taste of real food.
Wordlessly, Angeline stood and strolled into the kitchen. Lincoln quickly wiggled the pants over his boxers. He didn’t particularly like the undergarments but had learned to tolerate them during his recovery when the friction from long pants made his stump feel as if it were on fire.
“Bon appetite,” Angeline said, returning with a large foam box in her hands.
She opened the lid. The spicy scent of a mountain of buffalo chicken wings made his mouth water. His eyes might’ve, too, because she had offered him food. Actual everyday, take-for-granted, comfort food. Not canned or freeze-dried rations. Not bland, pasty mess hall slop or the airline’s processed micro
