Dark Wolf (Shadow Pack Book 1) (6 page)

“Frank Bearson. I assume you are David Finn, young sir,” Frank said as he extended a huge hand. David hesitated and then took the proffered hand without breaking off the dark contest of wills in which he was engaged.

“Yes, I’m David Finn. And you, Ms. Duncan, need to get out of this place as soon as possible. Is there somewhere we can talk privately?” David gazed between them with a coolly dispassionate glance. He then stepped back as Frank lumbered past him, pulling a dazed Katie in his wake.

“I’m going nowhere without my uncle,” she said through gritted teeth.

∙•∙

David felt a surge of relief at the word “uncle,” even though the pairing of the slender Katie and her beastly companion had been unlikely in the first place.

David immediately connected Katie’s companion with descriptions he had heard about the owner of the Laughing Bear. Frank Bearson was a huge, shaggy man, a figurative picture of the restaurant’s namesake. David was not deceived by the man’s size. There was not an ounce of fat on the restaurateur. He was solid as an aged oak.

The other man spoke. “Yes, my boy, I think that is a grand idea. Let’s go to my office before you two rip each other’s clothes off.”

David looked sharply at the other man, his eyes widening in amazement. He took in Frank’s shaggy hair, huge form, and pronounced incisors. Frank waggled his eyebrows at David, eyes flashing with a quick, blue light. The large man was as inhuman as David was. The familiar animal grace of his large form barreling his way to a back office beside the kitchen set off all of the Scotsman’s alarm bells.

A well-appointed office decorated in mahogany and antiques lay on the other side of the scarred pine door. The walls were lined with hand-built shelves packed with worn books that were clearly not just for show. The furniture was covered with luxurious fabric or leather, and Frank had a magnificent captain’s desk from a whaling ship of the eighteen hundreds. On the floor was a Persian rug in tasteful reds and yellows.

Frank escorted Katie to the settee and indicated David was to sit there as well while he seated himself behind his desk, his oversized office chair perfectly centered underneath an incredible oil painting of a Boston whaler from the glory days of sailing. The plaque on the gold frame proclaimed the name of the ship
The
Laughing Bear.
David felt sick to his stomach.

“You’re a Were.” It was not a question.

The other man nodded as he examined David from beneath his bristling brows. “Aye. An old were-bear grizzly of a scattered tribe. There are very few of us left, or for that matter, very few of you, my young wolf.”

“How can you be a grizzly? Are you part Native American…?”

“My mother was from a were-bear tribe from Russia. She met my father, who was an Alaskan Indian. The grizzly in him bred true for me, but I do have a touch of Russian bear in me that rises to the surface occasionally. When I am human, the Russian blood wins out, which is lucky because it used to be unfashionable to look like a half-breed Indian.”

David tried to concentrate on the other man’s words, but the presence of the blonde woman was overwhelming him. Another wave of lust rode up from David’s gut and hit him hard. He was doubled over from the painful need that filled his body. His cock was pulsating, desperate to come. Katie was perched on the settee, seemingly fighting her own battle, her breath coming in shallow gasps as she tried to get herself under control. It was clear she couldn’t speak, so David addressed her guardian again.

“What’s wrong with me?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with her?”

A broad grin covered the large man’s face, and he laughed again. David grimaced, swearing that when he could stand again, he would beat the hell out of the other man, bear or no bear.

“Finn, my lad, I always heard that when our kind finds a true life mate, it is agony until you can first touch. The need to mate will come and go in larger and larger waves until your privates feel near to bursting. And that is how it was between my beloved Libby and me. Why did you leave your people in Scotland, boy? There are plenty of lovely Were girls in the old country, I’ve heard. Did you feel empty when you looked at them? Did you try to date human women looking for that elusive feeling that you knew was out there, though you can never have a child with a human?” Frank paused. “You were brought here to meet my Katie. Call it fate, call it the work of the Almighty.” Frank let out another bellow of laughter. “I can’t believe your body did not clearly recognize what Katie was this morning, or she you…it must have been the bump on your head. And she has never known another like us except for me and her mother and father. But she had her suspicions, I’m sure.”

“What are you talking about, old man? What about Katie?” David’s brain was trying to tell him the meaning of the older man’s words, but his painfully throbbing cock was taking up all of his attention. How this veritable stranger could have such a shrewd grasp of the painful basics of his love life was beyond him.

Katie stood, sputtering.

“Frank, stop, please stop,” she said, reaching out one hand toward the older man. Her face was pale, and her eyes glazed with what seemed like terror.

David felt a bit freaked himself. Now, after all this time, he had found the one. The one woman meant for him alone, the match for his soul.

Pointedly ignoring her plea, Frank looked David directly in the eye. “Katie is a werewolf also, Finn, and she is meant for you. It is why you are both about to explode. You are life mates, and your bodies know that it is mating season.”

Katie buried her face in her hands, completely humiliated and horrified. There was nothing she hated more than any mention of the animal side of her nature. It had caused her so much pain, she avoided “going wolf” at all costs. And now Frank was telling a virtual stranger that their bodies were rebelling against their minds because of some pheromones she was putting out for mating season? She wanted to crawl under the carpet and die. The shock of the moment stemmed the lust roaring through her body. She sat back down, trying to compose herself. David was staring at her in amazement. His own breathing slowed, indicating he also had calmed the animal in his soul.

“Frank, there’s no such thing as a life mate anymore. I hardly know this man, and you’re mating us up because of a chemical imbalance that makes us both horny?” Katie was furious. The damned curse of her blood would be the end of her. She felt a passing moment of hatred for her parents. How could they have offspring, knowing that they would pass on their werewolf traits to their children?

Frank’s tone was firm, as if speaking to a wayward child. “Katie, there is far more to the people of the Were than chemicals and heredity. You know it as well as I do. Nature is filled with magic, and we are magical creatures. In the beginning, we
were
animals, uncontrollable in our rage. Our survival depends on the limits we have accepted from the Almighty Himself. This is not hormonal. This is the will of God, and you will have to get used to it.”

David’s dark brown eyes looked as confused and disoriented as she felt, but they also looked angry. He might be chemically attracted to her, but it was obvious his mind did not want her. She rose to leave. “I think I should go before this gets any weirder.”

The wolf man rose quickly to grab at her arm as she passed him and held her firmly prisoner. “Katie, I have no idea what is going on, but I do know that someone is after you, because they are waiting outside to snatch you when you leave the building. They’ve slashed your tires.”

∙•∙

David was reeling inside. How could he not have known what she was? He’d been watching her for weeks, protecting her, wanting and loving her from a distance.

In answer to his unspoken questions, Frank said, “You did not know her, David, because she is so far away from her spirit self. I’ve been trying to get her to go through the Change for months, to practice the craft of her people, but something is broken inside her. If I didn’t already know what she was, I could never have spotted it.”

∙•∙

The touch of David’s flesh on her arm, even through her soft sweater, started to make her clit burn again, and she wrenched herself away from his grasp. A vision flashed before her eyes of herself writhing naked on top of David’s splendid bare body, his cock filling her mouth. She drew on him as he ate at her swollen clit, a starving man at a banquet. The vision almost brought her to her knees, but David’s hard arms caught her. He immediately let go as soon as he righted her. He retreated to the other side of the office as if he’d been burned. Katie knew at that moment David had the same picture in his mind as well and that it shook him to the core.

David’s breath was ragged as he spoke into the awkward silence. “I first thought the people after you were part of the group that has been after me for a while, but now I think I’m only an afterthought, if anything, to these guys.”

Katie’s eyes filled, and she stared at the floor. Ambrose would kill David. Period. Any man who had ever looked at her in a lustful or loving manner died mysteriously until Katie discovered the truth about her stepfather. Then the deaths of the men in her life were a certainty. Ambrose killed any man who entered her life, immediately. She shuddered, envisioning the bastard’s smug, knowing grin. He had known enough about the true nature of the Duncan family to destroy Katie and took demonic pleasure in isolating her. Even a bodyguard who had made the mistake of treating her too kindly had met with an unfortunate “accident.”

Since her mother’s death, Katie had been running from Ambrose and from any man who had looked her way. Why, oh, why had she gone out in the snow last night?

Because she had been bound by the very instincts that were now tearing her apart. Instincts that propelled her out the door into the darkness to find and protect the wolf were now demanding him as a mate.

In gentle tones, her godfather broke into her despair. “Sweetheart, you cannot run from this. It is fated, and now that you two have met, there will be no peace for either of you unless you are together. It’s just the way it is.” He stood up and started to stuff an attaché case with papers. “It is time to go to ground, children. If they know about David being at your house, they sure as hell know about me by now. So we’ll go to my winter den, tell David some tales, and make some plans. Let’s get these hunters in
my
domain before we take them on.”

∙•∙

A protest rose in David’s throat, but the older man silenced him before he could get the words out.

“Don’t think that you can turn from her, Finn. Fate has you by the heart and balls on this one. Believe me. I know.”

“I have to warn my employees at the house that we might have visitors,” David said as he opened his jacket to pull at the well-worn grip of his Beretta. He checked it thoroughly before reaching down to pull the.38 from his ankle holster. He looked at Frank, deliberately ignoring his “life mate’s” face, which was now the blanched white of cooked pasta. “Do you know how to use one of these? Do you have one?”

The other man’s face betrayed no surprise or mistrust as he surveyed the gun David proffered. “No, I like my own type of weapons, thanks all the same. And I’m able to use a gun, boy. I am, however, going to be a bit nervous with a man as horny as you are bound to be at the moment with two guns on him. We’ll call your people from my truck on the way out of town. They can come get Katie’s and your cars. Just make sure they check for explosives first. Are your employees as handy as you seem to be when it comes to these matters?” Frank asked, pulling a sawed-off shotgun and a carton of ammunition from beneath his desk.

David smiled grimly. “Yes, they are very ‘handy’.”

∙•∙

Katie had been listening to this exchange with a growing rage and dread as her father’s best friend and this virtual stranger discussed her fate. Both men seemed to take it for granted she was just going to fall into David’s protective embrace. Crossing her arms over her aching breasts, she finally raised her gaze to meet David Finn’s dark eyes. “I don’t suppose either of you two were going to ask me what I would like to do. Hmmm?” She glared at Frank. “This guy could be a psychopath, a kleptomaniac, or just a plain old jerk, and you’re going to trust some mystical Were tradition enough to simply hand me over to him?” Whirling on David, Katie snapped, “And
you
, Mr. Finn, you have no clue what is going on. There is a very powerful man out there, my stepfather, who is capable of killing us all because he wants a wolf pup for a son! Do you know what he did to the last man I allowed into my life?” The picture of Nate’s body flashed in her mind, his empty blue eyes staring at her, seeming to beg her to help him, but she had been too late. She was always too late. “He was a local fisherman on the Outer Banks. I met him on one of the few days I was allowed to go into town. We managed to meet secretly at his boat on the days I wandered about the island. He was going to help me escape. The day I went to meet him, I found pieces of his boat on the beach. His body was farther down, but he hadn’t been in the explosion. He was unmarked except for his throat being cut. Then I understood why every man that had given me a second glance for the last few years either disappeared or mysteriously died.”

Shock and fury registered on David’s face but no fear, which worried her even more. “Your
stepfather
wants to mate with you?”

“Worse. He wants me to
willingly
go to him. To submit.” Her eyes filled with angry tears, and once again the shame and horror of her life made her tongue adhere to the roof of her mouth.

Frank took one of her arms in a huge hand and grabbed David with his other. “Less talk, more running. My truck is in the garage of my warehouse next door. Katie, you can tell him everything when we get into the mountains. Call your people, David, and tell them you won’t be home for lunch, and when you do finally get there, you won’t be alone.”

Frank gave them no time to work out his meaning. He shoved them both forward, heading down the hall to a large garage. He undid the deadbolt on the metal door as David pulled her to his side. A glance at his face kept her silent. She could feel his possessive hand through her jacket, as hot as molten metal. His every touch and every breath in her direction marked her as his property. Katie was furious at the thought of being labeled a possession.