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

“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.

He just shrugged. “Okay.”

“You like it?”

He pursed his lips like he’d never considered the question. “I like it well enough.”

She looked out over the landscape. It was dry and harsh, but the open space was intriguing. A place to fill with dreams and hopes, if a person dared.

“I was really sorry to hear about your mom,” he said in the silence that ensued.

A heavy weight settled in her stomach, like it always did when she thought about her mother. Fifteen was a crappy age to lose your mom, and even a decade passing didn’t take away the sorrow.

“How is your mom?” she asked, treading carefully over thin ice.

Now it was his turn to shrug and look into the distance. “She finally split up with Bruce.” He shook his head, like he still couldn’t understand what drove her to marry his stepfather in the first place. “Married a different guy.”

A better guy, she hoped. Though it would be hard to do worse.

“Do you see her much?”

“No,” he said, his voice flat and final, and his fingers flexed around the steering wheel. “Do you see much of your dad?”

The lead in her gut settled deeper. “K.I.A.” Kyle would know what it meant.
Killed in action;
a nice way to say blown apart by a land mine.

“Jesus, Stef.”

She could feel his eyes on her but kept her gaze trained firmly ahead.

“And your brother?” He asked like he was afraid to know.

She shrugged. “He’s still in the army.” Still trying to follow in their father’s footsteps, even if that meant getting killed. Still failing to answer the letters she refused to quit sending because he was all the family she had left.

She made a waving motion with her hands. “Anyway, there it is. Were you ever tempted to enlist?”

He shook his head. “I only ever wanted to be a cop.”

She read between the lines. Catch the bad guys. Put them away. Yeah, she could see the logic in that.

The truck crested a hill, and she caught a view into the valley beyond. A splash of irrigated green marked what had to be the ranch: a clutch of low buildings surrounded by a patchwork of paddocks and fields. When Kyle turned off at an unmarked track soon after, she clutched her seat belt. Driving through the desert had a certain suspended-in-time feel to it, but nearing an unknown destination didn’t sit well with her nerves. The truck rolled over a low, arching bridge then under a timber gateway where the ranch brand hung: two circles, overlapping by a third. She found herself twisting for a second look as it flashed overhead. Where was he taking her?

“Twin Moon Ranch,” Kyle murmured.

When Kyle parked in a central square flanked by century-old cottonwoods, she made no move to get out. She shoved her hands under her thighs, clamping down on herself like someone was about to drag her away. Even when he came around and opened her door, she felt stuck in place. Her chin was nearly touching her chest, her eyes squeezed tight. Maybe she couldn’t do this. Maybe she could still find that rattlesnake. Maybe—

“Hey,” Kyle whispered.

She tilted her head away.

“They can help.”

Her shoulders hunched, a flimsy suit of armor against her fears.

“I can help,” he said. “At least, I’ll try.”

The words warmed up that bleak space between despair and doubt, and she looked up at him. His eyes were steady and promising: Scout’s honor. He pulled the door just a little bit wider.

If he’d asked her now, she’d have admitted that the tough guy act was just a show. But he didn’t say anything; he just kept promising with those sincere eyes. She took a long, steadying breath, the kind she’d take on the starting line of a road race, then slid out of the car and eyed the building ahead.

The musky scent of wolf greeted her. Something instinctual identified it immediately. Every step felt heavy, every breath forced. The only thing keeping her planting one foot in front of another was Kyle, maintaining an even pace at her side.

Kyle was one thing. But what about the others?

She didn’t like this. Didn’t like this one bit.

CHAPTER FIVE

Kyle tried to convey a sense of confidence as he walked, though he was chastising himself inside. He should have explained about the pack on the drive over: how it worked, what shifters were, where she fit in. But Christ, he barely knew where he fit in.

Fluffy bits of cottonwood tumbled across the open space, and a shadow moved behind one of the council house windows. Was it Ty? Cody? Shit, he really should have given Stefanie a heads up.