First Moon (New Moon Wolves) BBW Werewolf Romance

First Moon
(New Moon Wolves)

Werewolf Romance

Michelle Fox

Copyright 2013. All Rights Reserved.

Blurb

Audrey Levine thinks being bitten by a wolf is just another day on the job. She couldn’t be more wrong.

A wildlife rehabilitation specialist, Audrey usually does all the rescuing, but now she's the one who needs help. In ten days, she’ll be covered in fur and howling at the moon while the wolf who bit her is out there, waiting to claim her as his own…whether she wants to be his or not.

The biggest problem? The curvy beauty doesn’t know any of this.

Werewolf Tao Black is the strong, silent type, which is an asset in his role as pack enforcer. Hot on the trail of a wolf gone bad, he runs into trouble and is saved by Audrey. Realizing her situation, he vows to protect Audrey from the wolf who bit her, no matter what it takes.

But that means going against his alpha’s orders…which might get them both killed.

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Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction intended for adults age 18 and over. Minors should stop here and close the book.

All events depicted are fictional. Characters are consenting adults. Any resemblance to places and persons, living or dead, is unintentional coincidence.

Every effort has been made to provide a quality reading experience, but editors and technology are fallible. Please report typos or formatting issues to [email protected]. You’d tell a girl if she had lipstick on her teeth, right? Please do the same for typos and formatting flubs.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Cindy M. and Amanda P. who helped proofread the story.

Chapter One

Audrey looked at all the blood spattering the driveway and tried to act nonchalant. No one else appeared green around the gills. She’d be damned if she was going to be the first person to puke her guts out at the crime scene. The police already made fun of the park rangers as it was.

Greenies they called them. Or tree huggers, if the cops were in a particularly bad mood.

“Miss Levine?” Sheriff Martin strode towards her, his uniform flexing over his powerful thighs. He had enough muscle to give him a natural swagger and the handsome looks that made women’s nether regions quiver at just the sight of him.

Audrey worked hard not to succumb. Sure, boyfriend pickings were slim out in rural Michigan, but she wasn’t his type, would never be his type. He liked tiny girls with giant fake boobs. Audrey had great boobs, thanks to very generous genetics. The problem? Her genes had been
over
generous every place else, too. So she tried not to get caught up in lusting after Sheriff Martin. It was never going to happen. Not unless she lost a gazillion pounds and magically became a size zero, while somehow maintaining her rack in the process.

Frankly, she liked ice cream way too much to even attempt that kind of weight loss.

The sheriff stood in front of her, his pecs impressive even through the khaki polyester of his uniform. Audrey caught herself staring at his chest and quickly looked away.

“Thanks for coming out.” His voice was a rough rumble, deep and masculine. The perfect voice to go with the perfect body.

“I came as soon as I got your call. Is Bob,” she stared helplessly at the blood again, “really dead?”

“I’m afraid so.” The sheriff looked grim. “Some wild animal mauled him.” He held up a plastic bag containing a cell phone. Red smeared the plastic. “You were his last call.”

Audrey swallowed hard. She’d wondered why they’d called her to the scene, now it was starting to make sense. “Bob told me he found something. He swore it was legit and wanted me to look at it.”

Bob also thought there were aliens in Roswell, mermaids in the ocean, mind control drugs in the food supply and that all politicians were corporate shills. Well, she had to concede, maybe that last one had some truth to it.

“Did he say what it was?” The sheriff looked at her, his dark gaze curious.

Her eyes darted from side-to-side, taking in all the details of her surroundings. Deputies were unrolling crime scene tape, blocking off Bob’s front yard. Police and ambulance lights blinked red and blue. Then she caught sight of the front door and gasped. Deep, jagged marks had been carved into the old wood as if something had tried to claw its way inside. Something big by the looks of it.

The sheriff followed the direction of her gaze and cleared his throat. “That’s one of the reasons we called you. We were hoping you could tell us what animal did that.” His previous question was forgotten for the moment.

“I-I don’t know,” she whispered, putting a hand to her mouth. Northern Michigan had wolves, coyotes and black bears, but the spread of the claw marks on the door far exceeded that of any native predators. She held up her hand, splaying the fingers and calculated the claws that had tried to break into Bob’s house were triple the span of hers.

Preternaturally big.

Too big to be real.

Could Bob’s death have been staged?

The thought startled her. The old man had been the resident crackpot ever since she’d started working at the national park along the shores of Lake Michigan. He often showed up at her office yammering on about aliens in the sand dunes and shoving blurry pictures at her as proof. Never mind her job was wildlife management and rehabilitation, not legends and myths.

Sheriff Martin watched her carefully. “We thought maybe it could’ve been a bear.”

Audrey considered the idea and then dismissed it with a shake of her head. “No, bears around here are smaller than that. I think...” she trailed off, uncertain as to whether or not she should speak her mind.

“What?” the sheriff prompted, his eyes dark as coal.

She took a deep breath. “I think you should consider if there was a human behind it, hoping to make it look like an animal attack. I don’t know of any animal out here that big. It could be a set up, a false trail.”

Sheriff Martin wrote something down in the black notebook he’d been cradling in his palm. “I’ll make a note of it.” He looked at her, his gaze piercing as a hawk searching for prey, he asked, “So, did you know Bob well?”

Audrey shook her head, the movement causing a strand of hair to slip free of her ponytail. “Not really. He would come into the ranger station periodically talking about aliens or Sasquatch.” She fiddled with her hair, tucking it behind her ear and hoping it would stay in place. Her strawberry blonde locks were notoriously difficult to contain. Naturally, they would act up in front of a hunkalicious police officer. So much for looking professional.

The sheriff’s lips twitched. Whether at the thought of Bob’s conspiracy theories or Audrey’s wayward hair, she couldn’t tell.

Regaining his composure, he said, “Did he ever find any?”

“No, not as far as I know.” She kept her head still, willing her hair to freeze too. One of her ex-boyfriends once told she looked messy and dowdy when her hair was out of control. The comment had left her paranoid.

The sheriff circled back around in his questioning. “When you talked to him on the phone, did he say what he’d found this time?”

They both glanced at the woods ringing Bob’s slumped, gray cottage. Was anything out there? Had one of Bob’s monsters come to life?

“He said he caught a werewolf.” She lowered her voice on that last word.

The sheriff rolled his eyes, but dutifully recorded her response in his notebook. Catching sight of the bandage on her forearm, he asked, “What happened there?”

She covered the bandage with her hand. “I had a run-in with a wolf. The wolf won.”

“Tell me about it.” It was a command, not a friendly request.

Audrey frowned, finding his interest in her injury odd. “I was working on some habitat restoration and the wolf came from behind. He was huge and aggressive.” She trembled to think of what would’ve happened if she’d been alone.
Sheriff Martin would probably be out searching for
her
chewed up body instead of dealing with poor old Bob. “Thankfully, my partner was with me and scared him off with a shot, but not before he took a chunk out of me. Since I’ve had all my shots…” She gave a nervous laugh at the joke, but cut it short when the sheriff didn’t seem amused. She cleared her throat. “I only got a few stitches at the clinic in Glen Vine.” Her job required her to be inoculated against rabies, which meant she didn’t have to do the full series of shots. The park station kept the booster on hand for just such an occasion; one quick shot and she’d been done.

“When was this?” The sheriff gave her a sharp look.

She blinked, stunned to realize the sheriff was suspicious. He didn’t seriously think she had murdered old Bob? Sure, she was a big girl, but not big enough to take on Bob. The man had been well over six feet tall with muscles hardened from all the hiking he did searching for evidence to support his latest whackadoo theory. “Yesterday. I filled out a workman’s comp report and my partner witnessed the attack.” She drew herself up to her full height and jutted her chin out, daring him to accuse her of murder.

“
Sheriff,” bellowed a loud voice from inside Bob’s house. “Get in here. You gotta see this.”

“Excuse me, Miss Levine. I’ll be right back.” The sheriff strode off with a curt nod. Apparently, he wasn’t suspicious enough of her to stick around.

Audrey wrapped her arms around herself. Day was passing into dusk now and a pre-autumnal chill filled the air. August this far north meant the heat of summer during the day and the chill of fall at night.

The idea of being outside after dark made her nervous. Normally, the biggest nighttime menaces were mosquitoes. Locals joked they were Michigan’s state bird, big and bloodthirsty enough to carry off babies. Now she wondered what else might be out there lurking in the shadows.

She shivered. Poor Bob. He’d been crazy, but he hadn’t deserved to die.

The sheriff appeared in the doorway. “Miss Levine, would you come inside please?” He waved her forward. “I think we found something.”

Audrey hesitated a second and then trudged into the house where the sheriff led her through a dingy living room filled with old, sagging furniture and a pile of cryptozoology books on a battered coffee table. From there, they passed into a grimy kitchen with a sink full of dirty dishes and out to the garage where the smell of feces and urine hit her nose.

She scanned the room for the source and found a large cage to the right. Inside laid a wolf, beautiful despite the filth he was trapped in. She guessed it was a he based on his size; females of most species always ran smaller than the males, and this wolf was
not
small. The wolf’s dark fur looked lush as black velvet. The animal looked at her with keen intelligence in his sky blue eyes and whined softly.

“Oh wow,” she breathed. He was...she cast about for the right word and settled on majestic. She’d never seen a wolf like this. The blue eyes alone made him unique.

“What is it?” asked the sheriff, pen poised on his note pad, ready to write down anything she said.

“This is not a wolf species I know.” Northern Michigan had gray wolves, not midnight black ones. He was huge too, easily big as a Great Dane, but with a deeper chest. Bob had really found something this time. Not a werewolf, but something just as special.

Sheriff Martin nodded as he wrote on his pad. “Is this the wolf that attacked you by chance?”

Audrey shook her head. “No.” Although, it had also been larger than normal, but with white fur that marked it as a probable albino. She frowned. What were not one, but
two
strange wolves doing up in the sand dunes of Michigan?

“Should we put him down?” asked one of the deputies, his hand going to his gun.

“I’ll defer to the park system on that one, deputy.” The sheriff nodded to Audrey. “Miss Levine?”

Audrey’s breath hitched at the idea of killing such a beautiful animal, but she couldn’t deny that the wolf probably should be put down. A large gash ran along his shoulder. It appeared to be healing, but the angry red color at the wound’s center meant he probably needed antibiotics. It wasn’t a fatal injury, but the state of Michigan didn’t rehabilitate wolves. Not anymore.

The wolf had come off the endangered species list a few years ago and now the state had so many wolves, the laws allowed them to be hunted. No one wanted a mega pack like the one that hounded a Russian village a few years ago. Three hundred hungry wolves circling a town would be a disaster.

She sighed and debated what to do. The caged wolf looked at her unblinking, as if trying to speak with his eyes. She imagined the message would be ‘save me.’ He would be easy prey in
the wild, too weak to fend for himself with a festering wound. Putting him down would be a mercy.