Hunter's Heart: Wolf Shifter Romance (Wild Lake Wolves Book 5)
Read Hunter's Heart: Wolf Shifter Romance (Wild Lake Wolves Book 5) Online
Authors: Kimber White
Hunter’s Heart
Wild Lake Wolves Series
Book Five
By
Kimber White
Copyright © 2016 by Kimber
White
All Rights
Reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,
without the written permission of the author or publisher, except where
permitted by law or for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is
a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events,
and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a
fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual
events is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note
The Wild Lake Wolves books have all been written so
you can enjoy them as standalones. While they can be read in any order, the
events within them do occur chronologically. For a full list of published books
in the series and their recommended reading order, visit the series page at
http://www.kimberwhite.com/wild-lake-wolves
.
Happy Reading!
Kimber
An hour phone call with the Ohio Bureau of Motor
Vehicles would only rank as my fourth worst experience of this particular day. I
crashed my head against the desk after the sixth transfer to another department
and about the tenth different answer.
“Yes!” I perked up and gripped my pencil, bouncing
the eraser against the desk. “Yes. I’m sure I sent the paperwork. Please check
again. Lyle. L-Y-L-E. Lyle Salvage Yard.” I smiled when I spoke. Grammy taught
me early if you don’t, they’ll know you’re mad. BMV clerks smell fear better
than werewolves. Another thing Grammy taught me. “Yes. That’s right. I’m
waiting for issuance on three Ford F-150 salvage titles. A ’98, a 2006, and a
2014. We got the one for the Airstream already.”
The current clerk was a mouth breather. “I’m showing
an entry for Thomas Lyle. Is that the one you’re talking about? I’ll need to
speak to him, directly,” she said.
“That’s my father. I have his Power of Attorney.
This is Jessa Lyle. MaryAnn, we’ve spoken on the phone before. Every month,
actually.”
She told me to hang on. She promised she’d be right
back. I didn’t get a chance to tell her not to put me hold before the line clicked
and went dead again. I snapped the pencil in half and threw it across the room.
“I’m done!” I screamed to no one. When I pounded my
fist against the wall, the whole trailer shook. Slow. Deep breaths. The minute
hand on the wall clock jerked to the six. No point in trying to get MaryAnn
back on the line. At four thirty, no doubt she’d punched out. She’d probably
hung up on me on purpose just so she could clock out.
Shit. It was four thirty. My father was due back by
noon. A cold pit formed in my stomach as I checked my phone. No calls. No
texts. Not a good sign. He knew to check in with me when he was out on a job.
Tapping the screen, I debated calling him myself. Problem was, even the simple
distraction of a vibrating phone might get him hurt or worse. See, call my
father a bit of a renaissance man. The salvage yard was just one income stream.
He made the bulk of his money as a bounty hunter, specializing in quarry of the
supernatural kind. The furrier the better.
Squeezing my eyes shut, I laid my palms flat on the
desk and resolved to wait. If I didn’t hear from him by dark, then I could
start to panic. Best thing to do now was check on Grammy and get dinner
started.
Shouting out in the yard drew my attention. I came
around the desk and peered through the lace curtains. Brutus charged out from
behind a truck cap laying in the yard and planted her front paws in the dirt. I
couldn’t see what had her so riled. In her case, her bark was literally worse
than her bite. Purebred Rottweiler, she looked the junkyard dog part. But, give
her a belly scratch and the worst threat you’d face was a face licking. Nope.
The real danger was Sofie, Grammy’s cock-a-poo. Damn dog bit anything that
tried to pet her. Brutus’s barking was sure to bring her out of hiding, so I knew
I needed to diffuse things quick.
“Shit.” I grabbed my phone and headed for the door.
I had just closed my fingers around the doorknob when a crack from a 12 gauge
drove me instinctively to my knees. “Shit!”
“Goddammit, are you crazy, woman?”
“Oh, shit.” I tore out of the trailer and ran
straight into the third worst thing that happened that day.
“Grammy! What the hell?”
Althea Lyle, my eighty-year-old grandmother—all four
foot ten, one hundred and fifteen pounds of her—leaned over the hood of my father’s
’69 Dodge Charger and aimed a shotgun at the chest of the closest man twenty
feet away. She racked another round and spit on the ground next to her. Brutus
ran to her side and rubbed Grammy’s bare leg. She wore red shorts and a black Garth
Brooks concert t-shirt.
“Jessa, tell that crazy old bitch to stand down!” I
put my hands up and moved slowly. I wasn’t foolish enough to put my body
between Grammy and her targets. Said targets were Jeff and Gunther Harlan. The
reason for their visit had the makings of the second worst thing that would
happen that day. Gunther’s comment made Grammy shift her aim lower, threatening
to unman him. That’s if he was lucky.
“Grammy,” I said, keeping my tone hard. If I talked
to her like she was crazy, she was liable to point both barrels at me. She
wasn’t
crazy. Not by a long shot. Which meant we were in deep shit.
“What’s going on, Gunther?” I asked. I could play
ignorant because, at the moment, I straight up was.
Gunther motioned to his brother. Jeff reached into the
back pocket of his jeans and pulled out a long white envelope. Handing it to
Gunther, Jeff took two steps back, making sure only Gunther stayed in the line
of fire.
“Your father never showed up for our appointment,”
he said. My heart dropped straight down into my size six cowboy boots. “You
heard from him?”
I shook my head. “No. But, I’ll make sure he knows
you’ve been looking for him.”
Gunther clenched his jaw and shot a look back at my
grandmother. God, I hoped he wasn’t crazy enough to take a step toward her. Her
nostrils flared and she adjusted her weight across the hood of the Charger.
Only I recognized the small twitch in the corner of her left eye. She was
barely holding it together. Grammy was scared, which meant things were far
worse than I thought.
“We paid him in advance, Jessa,” Gunther said, and
the air went straight out of me. “He doesn’t deliver by midnight tonight, we’ll
be back. You understand?” He threw the envelope on the ground. “That guy needs
to be taken care of.”
I nodded, leaning down to pick up the crumpled
envelope. Through the paper I could see a folded photograph of Dad’s latest
mark. Why Gunther thought I needed it was beyond me.
“Good. You make
Tinker
understand.” I
bristled at the sound of my father’s nickname dripping off Gunther Harlan’s
lips with contempt. As in Tinker Bell. But, that’s not how he earned it. Dad
was an inventor too. I told you, renaissance man. I bit my lip past the urge to
point out how that tinkering had saved the Harlan brothers’ asses on more than
one occasion. But God, Dad took money for a job in
advance
? What was he
thinking? Gunther stared at me with deep-set gray eyes so pale they looked like
the dead.
“Midnight,” Gunther said again. “You tell him we’re
expecting proof of death on this one. Not a capture. He can find me at the
Depot in the back room. You feel me?”
I’d edged over to Grammy’s side. I wasn’t foolish
enough to put my hands on her while she was riled up like this, but the muscles
in her shoulders relaxed ever so slightly. She was still worried, but she
wasn’t homicidal.
“Got it,” I said. “I’ll bring him down there myself,
Gunther. Everything’s going to be fine. You can tell your boss.” I emphasized
the word “boss.” Gunther expressed his displeasure by narrowing his eyes. Then
he backhanded Jeff against the chest and the two of them slipped into their
BMW. He kicked up dirt with his back tires as he sped away.
Brutus charged after them, growling and yelping as
she went. Sofie finally showed up and joined the fray. When the Harlans made
the turn down the muddy, rutted lane leading back to downtown Banchory, I
finally let my shoulders drop and turned to Grammy.
The tremors started in her shoulders and spread
quickly to her fingers. I peeled the shotgun out of her hands rubbed her back.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes clouded with fear.
“Where is he?” I swallowed hard. “What happened?”
She tucked a strand of wiry gray hair behind her
ear. She wore it long, a single braid down the middle of her back. Her high,
wide cheekbones, weathered with age still marked her proud Odawa heritage. She
closed her fingers around my wrist and pulled me toward her trailer in the back
of the lot.
“Hurry.” Her soft whisper sent shivers of terror
through me, much more so than if she’d shouted. I slung the shotgun over my
shoulder and went with her.
Grammy’s trailer butted up against the ten-foot high
privacy fence the county made us erect. Grammy and Grampy had to fight to get
the permits to open this place. It all happened long before I was born, but she
liked to tell the story. She’d said they bought this hunk of ground on the
outskirts of hell just to have a place to store all of the junk my father
brought home. The salvage yard just seemed a natural fit. So, while my father
tinkered in the pole barn Grampy built, he—ever the shrewd businessman—figured
out how to turn what Dad didn’t use into cash. For years, it sustained them.
After Grampy died, she ran it until Dad was old enough to take over.
I don’t remember much about my grandfather. But in
every photograph, I could see his love for Grammy lighting his soft blue eyes.
Always touching her. Hand in hand. Nuzzling her cheek. Pulling her into his
lap. My father never had that with my mother. We had no photographs of her at
all. Not even from their wedding. They never said as much, but I’d deduced it
was of the shotgun variety. But, when the bloom wore off, Mom didn’t want to
spend the rest of her life living in a junkyard. So, she lit out the first
chance she got, which was before I was even old enough to form memories.
Grammy paused to catch her breath before she climbed
the porch steps at the front of her trailer. She clutched my wrist and peered
up at me. “He doesn’t want an ambulance,” she said. Nodding, I swallowed hard and
reached for the door handle and walked into the second worst thing that
happened that day.
My father lay clutching his side on Grammy’s floral
printed living room couch. His color ashen, he wheezed as he exhaled. I leaned
the shotgun against the wall then half skidded across the carpet to get to his
side. I put a hand to his forehead. His skin felt clammy and cool as I worked
my fingers down his chest, gingerly pulling his shirt out of his waistband and
checking for wounds.
“What happened?” I asked. “Did a wolf do this?”
Choking, my father shook his head. “No. I never even
got that far.”
I leaned back on my heels and cocked my head to the
side. “Then what?”
“Competition,” he managed before he collapsed into a
fit of strained coughs that tore at my heart. “The Cavanaughs maybe. Coltranes coulda
been. Wouldn’t be surprised if Gunther clued one of ‘em in. He’s been trying to
drive my prices down for months now.”
“He got jumped on the way to the job,” Grammy filled
in. “Says he couldn’t see faces. Just boots when he hit the ground.
Steel-tipped. Kicked him, they did.”
I pulled Dad’s shirt up over his hips and saw the
angry black and red welts all along his rib cage.
“Heard one of those crack,” he gasped. “I’ll be all right
though. Haven’t coughed anything up.”
“Dad, you need to be seen by a doctor. You could be
bleeding inside.”
“No!” He put a hand up. “Jessa, we’re done for. If
the Harlans find out this happened, they’ll put me out of business for good. I
told ya. The Coltranes and the Cavanaughs are just waiting for something like
this to swoop in and outbid me.”
“Fine. Then we’ll give them back your advance.”
Dad shook his head again. “Nothing doing. That
money’s gone, pumpkin.”
My heart turned to stone and the air grew thick. I
was afraid to ask him how much money we were talking about. Except I already
knew. Gunther said this was a kill job, not a capture. Dad wouldn’t have
accepted less than a hundred thousand dollars for one of those. Enough to
support us the rest of the year and a good chunk of my college tuition whenever
I got the time to go back. But gone?
“It’s okay, Jessa,” he said. With great effort, he
sat up and reached under the couch cushion on which he been lying. He pulled
out a sleek, black Sig Sauer P226. “They didn’t get this.”
“They didn’t get your weapon?”
Dad shook his head. “No. They didn’t get these.” He
pulled out the magazine. “The Wolfkillers,” he said, holding the magazine out
in his palm.
My heart thudded in my chest. Wolfkillers. Tinker
Lyle’s latest, greatest invention. Ammo modified with a special neurotoxin that
paralyzed its target no matter where it entered the body. Which might seem like
literal overkill except when you were trying to shoot a werewolf. Suckers are
bloody fast and if you don’t hit them through the heart or the brain on the
first shot, they tend to get back up.
“So you think someone was trying to mess you up
tonight?”
“Yep. Take me out, get my secret weapon, show the Harlans
I’m no longer a safe bet.”
“Great. And what about your target? Gunther said you
had until midnight. Is that where the money went?” I lifted the magazine.
Dad nodded. “I made the final modifications with it.
Call it a capital investment.’
“Terrific, except you still have to deliver the
contract, Dad.”
Coughing, he nodded. “There’s still time. Just tape
me up. I’ve already tracked the fucker. He’s holed up just outside of Banchory.
That KOA off County Road 14. This one should be a piece of cake. He’s totally
alone. Chances are he got banished from his pack. I’ve been watching him for
days. Keeps to a pretty stable routine.”