Desert Fate (The Wolves of Twin Moon Ranch Book 3) Read online

  “Believe me, you need help.”

  “No one can help me.”

  He took in her matted hair, the dark lines under her eyes, and wondered how long she’d been on the run. He took a deep breath, reminding himself not to get too involved. He had to do a lot of that in his job. Usually, he could tune out, step back. But this time, his wolf was stirring, his nostrils flaring to catch more of that alluring scent.

  He leaned in with a whisper. “I know what you are.”

  He saw her eyes go wide and her body stiffen, though she tried to strike a nonchalant pose. She was proud, that was clear. Reluctant to show weakness. He knew the type; saw it in the mirror a couple of times a day. Or at least, the few times he bothered looking.

  “And what am I?”

  He looked at the colors swirling in her eyes, the inner wolf begging for release.

  “You’re the same as me.”

  Or what he’d once been; close enough. He’d made it through the Changeling stage and out the other side, becoming a true shifter, capable of changing from his human body to wolf and back.

  He could see her weighing believing against fleeing and wished he could explain. Every human carried a second side deep inside, and hers had been awakened. If only he could just say it. Changeling.

  But words would never convince her, so he held his tongue, afraid to spook her off. More afraid than he ought to be. Why did it matter so much?

  It matters, his wolf growled.

  Slowly, carefully, she reached a hand toward him. The woman had guts, that was for sure. He held his breath when she touched a single finger to his jaw, and the rush came again. Whatever strange energy she carried had jumped over to him and was spinning crazy laps around his body.

  She tilted his chin up, examining his neck. A second later, she pulled away with an angry cluck.

  “I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing.”

  “We’re the same,” he insisted. It’s just that his neck wasn’t where he carried his scars.

  The woman watched, wary, as he worked down the top buttons of his shirt and pulled one side toward his shoulder, exposing the four parallel scars. Claw marks, puckered and red even after all these years.

  “A bite’s not the only way to turn someone,” he explained, keeping his voice steady even as memories roiled inside.

  She stared, first at the scars, then at his face.

  “Wolf?” she whispered.

  He nodded, letting out a puff of relief. At least she hadn’t turned tail and run again.

  “There’s someone we need to see. Someone who can help,” he said, tilting his head in the direction of his truck.

  “How can anyone help?” The hopelessness in her tone made him ache.

  He ran a hand through his hair; the sweat was already making it go stiff. What the hell should he tell her?

  “I don’t know. But I know they can.” Somehow. He nodded toward the truck, wondering if she would follow.

  But the woman had gone stock-still, gaping at him. What had he said? Kyle tensed, ready to grab her if she tried to flee again.

  She didn’t run, though. In fact, she took a step closer, eyes swirling like a witch’s brew.

  “It’s you,” she murmured, lifting a hand as if to touch his face.

  He blinked, wondering if maybe she was on drugs, after all.

  She nodded, a look of wonder replacing the raw distrust on her face. “It is you. Kyle. Kyle Williams.”

  He rocked back on his heels, unsure what to make of this stranger who knew his name. Then something in his memory gave a sleepy lurch, and just like that, the woman wasn’t a stranger anymore. The freckles, the tousled hair, those eyes… Take away the glimmering flecks, and the hickory color was one in a million. A melody kicked off in his mind, and there she was, his brown-eyed girl.

  “Stef,” he managed. “Stefanie Alt.” He gaped a minute longer, trying to process it all. “What are you doing here?”

  Her eyes asked him the same thing.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Stefanie sucked in a long breath. She’d always had to do that around Kyle: take a deep breath and feign normality. Something about the hulk of him did that to her, even when he was fourteen and nowhere near the man he was now.

  Because Kyle Williams, erstwhile neighbor and troubled kid on the block, had filled out quite nicely since those days when they were both army brats living side by side in family housing. Quite nicely, indeed, judging by the layers of steel she’d been pushing against a moment ago. But the underlying parts she’d always had X-ray vision for were unchanged. Where others saw leather-tough, Stef saw battered and bruised. Where others saw a time bomb, ready to explode, she saw raw nerves. Where others heard only silence, she heard a soul begging for help.

  She remembered it all too well: the shouts, the cries, the drunken threats of Kyle’s stepfather. The helplessness they’d both felt. The army had a way of hiding its own dirty laundry, and nobody ever got serious about trying to help.

  She looked up and down the six-foot frame, comparing it to the lanky kid of her memory. He had been a grade ahead of her in school—should have been two, but he’d repeated a year somewhere along the line—and yet every time they passed in the hallway or made eye contact in the cafeteria, she felt like she had a friend. His hair was short and spiky as always, as if it was part of his defenses. The narrow mouth, the impossibly blue eyes.

  “Kyle…” There was no mistaking him, for all that time had added creases to his face. The guarded expression was the same, too. The man, like the boy, held his cards close to his chest.

  “Stef…”

  He remembered, too. Maybe even more than her name, given the way those eyes were flashing with memories. What was he thinking, seeing her reduced to such a mess?

  A yucca swayed in the wind, triggering something inside her to scream caution. Just because they’d once been friends didn’t mean he was the same old Kyle. He’d chased her down, after all, and thrown her to the dirt. Could he be trusted?

  Yes.

  The word resounded deep inside her lungs and spread through her body like a blue flame.

  Yes.

  She could trust Kyle the way she’d trusted him back then, the day he’d found her crying on her very first day of school. Her fifth school, and it was only seventh grade. You’d think that a girl with that much experience picking up and starting over would have gotten over the ripped-open feel of it all, but no. Once the see-how-tough-I-am energy she’d been channeling all day wore off, tears had taken over and her mind chanted one wish: that home could be a place to move to for more than twelve months. A place to stay. Forever.

  “Stef,” he breathed, blue eyes searching as they’d done that very first time.

  She had already gone from outrage to shock and warm recognition; now she skipped ahead to shy. To Kyle, she was probably still just the awkward girl from next door. The two of them had only had that one year in Fort Benning in common, and she was the forgettable type with plain brown hair and brown eyes. The kind who never quite fit in.

  A little like Kyle. Except he was anything but forgettable.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked. The words fast-forwarded her into the present. There they were, the two of them, standing in the desert. Here. Now. Close.

  Close enough to see the pulse in his neck. Close enough to inhale his warm scent.

  Close enough to kiss.

  She forced herself to snap back to the question. What was she doing in Arizona? Her adrenaline high collapsed on top of itself, leaving her sagging.

  “I wish I knew.”

  Kyle’s eyes went liquid, twin icebergs melting into puddles of achingly bright blue. He reached for her arm. “How about a drink?”

  She hesitated, still reeling from it all: his sudden appearance, running away, getting tackled. And most of all, what had happened next. The way he came down over her was way too…intimate. For a few seconds, everything had vanished—the desert, the fear, the pain�
��and it was only him. She’d clung to his arms like a shipwrecked sailor to a piece of flotsam, praying for salvation.

  The crazy thing was, he’d been the same. One minute he’d been sniffing her, like…like he wanted her, and the next, he was pulling back with shock written all over his face. And the worst part was, she’d wanted him, too. Wanted to hold him, feel him, have him. If he’d held her a second longer, she’d have thrown a leg around him like a dog in heat. Jesus, what had come over her?

  “You sure you’re okay?”

  “Fine.”

  Sunstroke, maybe? Or was the madness progressing? Now she wasn’t just dreaming of becoming a beast, but behaving like one, too. Soon she’d be lusting after any whiff of testosterone that came her way. She shook her head, disgusted. But what to do?

  “Come on. Come get a drink.” His voice was an addiction waiting to happen, and she was all too eager to try her first hit.

  So she followed him down the slope, trying not to notice how neatly those cargo pants boxed his ass or how wide his T-shirt stretched across his shoulders.

  “Jesus, Kyle. How long has it been?”

  He glanced back at her, eyes guarded. “Fifteen years? Sixteen?”

  Sixteen years. Surely sixteen years made him a stranger and not a friend.

  But there he stood, holding the truck door open, looking all the world like a friend.

  Stef hesitated then stepped forward and heaved herself into the cab. The door closing behind her only registered as a distant thump as she twisted the cap off the bottle on the seat and downed the tepid water in one desperate gulp.

  She wiped the spillover from her chin when Kyle slid into the driver’s seat. He sat quietly for a minute, looking at her. His eyebrows were angled up toward his ears, twin accent marks above the blue eyes.

  “Stefanie,” he murmured. The way it rolled off his tongue made her think of a bear licking honey. Long, sweet, satisfied, and more than willing to sample a little more. She slid him a sideways glance, but he started the truck and kept his eyes on the road. He headed away from the highway, not toward it. She wasn’t sure what to make of that, but with a cooling breeze coming in through the window and a country tune playing on the radio, she didn’t much care.

  “Who do I need to see, Kyle?”

  “Hmm?” He looked at her, and there they were again, those sky blue eyes—minus the streaks of gold. Had she been imagining that special effect? Well, she hadn’t been imagining the rest. The square jaw, the parentheses around his mouth, the slanting cheekbones. He had the aura of an off-duty soldier or the veteran of one too many campaigns. A soldier of fortune, she wondered, or an honorable soul?

  A man with a dark past, that much was certain. He’d been an enigma back then, and life had obviously swung a few more punches in his adulthood.

  A lot like her.

  “This is the way to my place.” He must have sensed her tense up because he went on quickly. “You need something to eat, I figure, and a chance to clean up. Then I’ll take you to the ranch.”

  Stefanie glanced in the side view mirror and blanched. No wonder he’d been eyeing her strangely. Her hair—never her strong suit—was sticking up on one side, matted on the other. God, she looked like a ghost. Her face was thinner, the hollows of her cheeks darker. She felt like a ghost, too. Her old life—her normal life—seemed so far away. How many days had it been since she’d fled Colorado? Four? Five?

  “Is today…Thursday?”

  He looked at her sharply. “Sunday. The twelfth.”

  She bit back her protest. How could it be Sunday? That made three days she couldn’t account for, plus the couple she’d rather forget.

  Kyle seemed more comfortable with silence than she was, so she let her eyes rove the truck, the scenery; anything but him. But after bouncing along on the dirt road for another few minutes, her thoughts took on the quality of the scenery: a distant blur, rushing by with no particular focal point. Arizona was like the truth—harsh and inescapable. Impossible to digest in one bite.

  She tried focusing on a closer point. There was an ID card sitting on the console, and she could just make out the print: Department of Public Safety. She cast a sideways glance at Kyle. State Trooper? Wouldn’t surprise her one bit. The eyes in the photo promised justice, hard justice, for anyone who dared victimize another. Even squeezed into a small square, the face in that picture was imposing. Almost as imposing as in real life.

  You wanted a cop, she thought. You got one.

  It could have been minutes or hours that they drove in silence. She barely noticed until her chin snapped up—along with her drooping eyelids. The truck slowed, approaching a house. His house?

  She couldn’t help but noticing, as she did with all buildings, the angle and orientation of the roof, part of her mind already calculating how many solar panels she might squeeze in, how many amps they might produce. A reminder that she had to call in to work. But how would she ever explain her long absence?

  She shoved the worry aside. There was enough to deal with for now.

  A porch ran across the face of the low-slung ranch house worn ragged by the elements. The place had a certain charm, though. It was a survivor, like Kyle. She followed him up the creaky stairs. In one corner of the porch was a box of recyclables with cobwebs strung between them. At the other end, a single chair was pulled up to the railing, staring blindly at the view. East, she noted, taking in the sloping lines of open scrubland beyond. Did he sit there and contemplate the cruelties life could deliver, or the joys?

  “Hungry?” Kyle asked, pulling the screen door open with a rusty screech.

  Starving, her stomach answered.

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  He raised an eyebrow, and the accent mark stretched. “I remember that.”

  She crossed her arms. “Remember what?”

  His thin smile grew. “That.”

  Stef wondered what exactly “that” meant to him. Her stubbornness? That’s what her mother used to call it. She herself preferred doggedness, as a track coach once said.

  The way his eyes wandered over her frame suggested it was something altogether different.

  “What?”

  He flashed a full smile, exposing a line of perfect teeth. “That. That…” He circled a hand in front of her body. “That tough guy act.”

  “Not an act, Williams.” She did her best to bristle, though her heart wasn’t in it.

  Kyle looked at her, long and silent, then jutted his chin left. Like so much about him, that little gesture, that I’ll-shelve-this-for-now movement, hadn’t changed one bit.

  He held the front door open for her—unlocked, she noticed—and waited as she wavered under the upside-down horseshoe hanging over the threshold. The inside of the house was dim, and her next steps felt terribly important, as if she were at a major crossroads instead of a tiny bump.

  “Stef,” he prompted, coaxing her in.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  She swallowed away her fears, stepped in, and blinked. The front room was small but homey. Clean but cluttered.

  “It’s, um…kind of a mess,” he started, darting ahead to grab a pizza box and an empty bottle of beer.

  Not that she’d been expecting neat, of course. Not with Kyle.

  For the first time in a week, she smiled. “It’s fine.”

  Books and magazines spilled over the ends of rough shelves balanced on cinder blocks. One wall was decorated with still-life paintings of desert flowers; the other held a drooping state map. The plaid couch practically patted her over to take a seat. A battered leather recliner hunched like a bulldog beside it, facing a stone fireplace. She could picture Kyle there, feet propped up, staring into the flames on a lonely winter night. All in all, the place was a strange cross between a bachelor pad and an old widow’s nest, as if the former occupant had never quite moved out, and Kyle had never quite moved in.

  He was already in the kitchen, rooting around the antique refrigerator, and just like that, she gave
in to his quiet insistence.

  By the time he led her out of the house an hour later, Kyle had not only fed and watered her like a hungry camel but also shooed her into the shower. Hot water and soap helped make her feel more… human, even if slipping into the clean shirt he’d sheepishly offered sent a ripple of something heated and primal through her bones. She stopped just short of running a hand over the steamed-over mirror to check her appearance. Who would she find there, behind the mist? Her old self, or whoever this new beast taking her over was?

  She smoothed her fingers over the cotton T-shirt and decided not to look. A couple of hurried steps later, she was out the front door, where Kyle immediately jumped out of his chair. The man had good manners, like all army brats.

  Or maybe not, she thought a moment later when he was still staring. Maybe she should have used that mirror, after all. “What?”

  He jerked his eyes away. “Nothing.”

  Eyes down, he led the way to the truck and opened the door on her side before circling around to his. It seemed to be jammed, so she stretched across the cab to push it open. By the time she was upright in her own space again, she felt light-headed from the scent of him. A healthy, outdoorsy scent, like wood and fresh air and a homey den, and damned if she didn’t lean left to get just a little more.

  “A half-hour drive,” Kyle said, “Then we meet the pack alpha—the boss.” He kept his eyes glued to the road as he drove. “On the ranch.”

  Ranch? Stef looked left and right. No horses. No cowboys. What ranch?

  A ponderous silence filled the cab, a silence that even the vistas of the drive couldn’t overcome. She had the urge to fill it with something. Anything. Even awkward conversation would do.

  “How long have you lived here?” she started.

  “Five, six years.”

  The army brat in her whistled. “Six years in one place? What does that feel like?”

  The creases in his forehead eased just a little bit, but he didn’t say what she expected: Good. It feels good to have a place to call home.