Rebel Wolf (Shifter Falls Book 1) Read online

  “Anna.”

  So she put on her coat, stuffed her hat and mitts into the pockets, and walked out the door as he paid the bill from his last fifty dollars.

  She had the car started by the time he opened the door to the passenger side, and she had cranked up the slow-acting heater. She tried not to watch as he folded his long legs and big body into her car and slammed the door.

  “I need to do this,” she said to him. The words slipped out before she could stop them. “It isn’t just a whim. I’ve always wanted to do this—to study shifters, to go to Shifter Falls. All my life, everyone has told me that’s a stupid idea that will get me killed.” She looked up at him. “Not one person has ever believed I can do this. Not one.”

  He was watching her from those green eyes. “I believe you can do it,” he said, apparently with no idea how the words hit her so hard she could barely breathe. “Your courage isn’t the problem, and neither are your brains. The problem is that you don’t know the terrain, and I do. And that makes me responsible.”

  She shook her head. “You don’t have to be responsible for me.”

  The corner of his mouth quirked. “That, right there, shows how little you know about shifters.”

  She curled her hands into fists and rested them on the steering wheel. “I didn’t set up this project so I could be someone’s burden.”

  “You want to be in the field,” he said, “you give up that control.”

  She blew out a frustrated breath and put the car in drive, heading out of the parking lot and back to the highway.

  “I could drive, you know,” he said.

  “I’m driving,” she told him, her voice tight.

  “You gonna stay mad for the next two hours?”

  She stared hard at the road. “I haven’t decided. Do you care?”

  “Okay, fine.” He ran a hand through his hair. She tried not to notice his hands again, how nice they were. “I’ll talk, then. You can listen, or you can throw me out of the car. Your choice.”

  She was quiet. Because, as angry as she was, damn it if she didn’t want him to talk.

  “You got some kind of file on me?” he said, his low rumble of voice filling the car. “On my life?”

  “A little.”

  “What does it say?”

  She glanced at him, then back at the road again. “You’re twenty-seven. Your father is Charlie Donovan, the late alpha of the Donovan pack. Your mother’s name was Geneva Halberston. Nothing else is known about her.”

  “She’s dead,” he said. “She died when I was ten. She overdosed on heroin sold to her by one of my father’s pack brothers. Continue.”

  Anna had nothing to say for a minute. She’d had no idea. But he was waiting for her to talk, so she unscrambled her brain and recalled the facts from her file. “You were born in Wyoming. You moved to Shifter Falls sometime around age twenty, when you were first picked up for stealing a car. Your last arrest, for fighting, was in Denver.”

  “I don’t live in Denver,” he supplied. “I live in the Falls. I go to Denver to fight.” He paused. “I went to Denver to fight. Shifter fighting is good money there.”

  “You’re a wolf shifter,” Anna finished. “You have a juvie record, but it’s sealed.”

  “That’s nothing,” he said dismissively. “A couple of fistfights. Not something I’ll ever do again.” He paused, waiting. “What else?”

  Anna shrugged. “That’s all. That’s all that’s in the file about you.”

  “Fuck, that’s not very much,” he said. She saw from the corner of her eye as he shifted in his seat, sinking down, folding one long leg up so his jean-clad knee rose above the dashboard. He scratched the hair along his jaw, the sound of it making her blood go quietly hot in her veins, though of course he didn’t notice. Damn him. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll fill you in.”

  “I’d like that,” she admitted.

  “It’s true I was born in Wyoming,” he said. “My mother fled there to get away from Charlie after he knocked her up. They had a thing where she kept going back to him, and he kept hitting her and cheating on her. Round and round. Charlie was a real fucking prince.”

  Anna watched the road and waited for him to continue.

  “So she left,” he said. “I was born in a trailer park. Mom had problems with drinking and drugs. And men. Charlie stayed away for a while, but eventually he found her. I met him exactly four times, and each time he called me worthless before he beat the shit outta me. Took me a while to realize he did it partly to keep my mother afraid. She didn’t go back to him, though, not after she had me. She stopped going back.” He paused, looking out the passenger window at the snowy world passing by outside. “I found her overdosed in our trailer when I was ten. I didn’t want to go to a foster home—they’d never find one for a shifter, anyway. So I packed a bag and lived on the streets for a while.”

  “Oh,” Anna said, the word tumbling out. Her stomach was clenching. “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t so hard for a wolf,” Ian said. “We don’t get cold, and when we’re hungry we can change and hunt. I stuck to small towns and the woods. I drifted back down into Colorado. I couldn’t quite stay away from Shifter Falls. When I was sixteen, I ran into my brother Devon in a bar, and he took me out back and tried to kill me.”

  “Why?”

  “Wolves are loners,” Ian said. “They’re territorial, and they don’t like competition. Devon wanted me gone. He figured if he didn’t kill me, one of these days I’d kill him.”

  “Would you?” she couldn’t help but ask.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  She glanced at him. “You just made it clear that I don’t know anything about you.”

  He was quiet for a second. “The answer is no,” he said finally. “Power isn’t my thing. I don’t get off on it. I have no plans to kill my brothers and take over the pack leadership. But they don’t know me, and they don’t trust me, and I’m blood. I don’t blame them.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “You believe me?”

  “Sure I do.” When he didn’t say anything, she prompted him. “So Devon tried to kill you. He obviously didn’t succeed.”

  “No,” Ian said. He absently ran a hand up and down his jean-clad shin, agitated, and she caught a glimpse of his watch again. “I escaped. I stayed around the edges of the pack, never moving to the center of it. Charlie was into all kinds of shit. Drugs, guns, women. There’s a small pack in California, and a big pack in South Dakota, but other than that, his territory was fucking huge. No competition. Lots of money, lots of blood. Charlie offered to let me in more than once. He thought I was worthless shit, but I was still his blood, which he thought would buy my loyalty. He kept trying to tempt me with things—money, power, women.”

  “But you didn’t join,” Anna said.

  “No. I wasn’t interested in any of that. I just wanted to be left alone to live my life. I got tired of moving around all the time, so I got a place in Shifter Falls. Charlie knew I was there, of course—someone probably told him within five minutes of my showing up. He left me alone to see what I would do. I had to do something that showed everyone not to mess with me, so I started cage fighting. When I started to win, word got around that I wasn’t someone to fuck with. It was a sort of protection, so I kept doing it.

  “My brothers tried to drive me out. Nothing personal, but it’s second nature for us Donovans. Devon got in my face and made it clear he hated me, but he didn’t try to kill me again. Heath and I got in a fistfight, but I won. Brody actually tried to fucking talk to me, but I told him to fuck off, and he never tried again.”

  “You didn’t want to talk to him?” Anna asked.

  “Two of my brothers had tried to run me out of town by then,” Ian said shortly. “You think I was going to trust a third one?”

  “I guess not.” Anna bit her lip. She’d expected his life to be rough, but she hadn’t thought it would be this bad. What have I gotten myself into? She
stared at the road, wondering.

  “You still want to come with me to the Falls?” Ian asked, as if reading her mind.

  “Of course I do,” she said automatically. “So you started fighting, right?”

  “A few years ago,” he said. “You ever seen a shifter cage fight?”

  Anna shook her head.

  Ian was quiet for a minute. “It’s like nothing you’ve ever seen,” he said, his voice low. “Nothing at all.”

  Anna blinked, trying to picture it. What did that mean? “Isn’t it dangerous?”

  “That’s the point.”

  “So why do it?”

  “Like I said, once I got a reputation as a fighter, it kept my brothers off my back. Plus the money.”

  “But you must have gotten hurt.”

  “Yes. Shifters heal quick, but we scar. So I paid my price.” She saw him shrug. “And then I got picked up, and I spent the last year inside. That’s all there is to it.”

  This was why she’d gotten into social work. This was why she wanted to work with shifters. The lives some of them led—so dangerous, so lonely, so close to the edge. There had to be another way. “Do you have a wife?” she asked. “Children?”

  That actually made him laugh, an easy sound that filled the car and made her heart speed up uncomfortably. “After hearing that story, you actually think I have a wife and kids?”

  “People do,” she countered, trying not to feel happy that he didn’t have a wife somewhere, raising his kids.

  “I don’t,” he replied. “We don’t have wives, anyway. We have mates.”

  “So, no mate?” she asked. “No one steady?”

  She felt him looking at her. “What do you know about shifter mating?” he asked.

  She felt her cheeks warm. Damn. “There isn’t much in the literature about it,” she admitted. “It seems to be… secretive.”

  “Well, I’m not getting into it,” Ian said, making her feel relieved and burningly curious at the same time. “But shifters have to take human women, and surprise, surprise—most human women don’t want a fucking thing to do with us.”

  “Oh,” Anna said.

  “What about you?” he asked. “You got a boyfriend who’s going to be pissed that you’re spending three weeks with me?”

  “No,” she said. “No boyfriend right now.”

  “Come on,” he said. “Be honest. They follow you around campus, you and that hair of yours.”

  She felt her spine straighten. He likes my hair? But she had to shut that down, fast. “Ian, we’re going to have a professional relationship,” she said. “You shouldn’t flirt with me.”

  “I don’t flirt, I observe,” he said. “I observe that you have the kind of hair that guys follow around. As well as other things.”

  What other things? Tell me, tell me. “Stop talking,” she said.

  He looked out the passenger window again and laughed quietly to himself. Anna felt every beat of that laugh in a pulse between her legs. “I’ll, um,” she managed, trying to talk over her dirty thoughts. “I’ll tell you about me, then, okay? That’s part of the deal.”

  “Okay,” Ian said. “Talk.”

  So she told him about herself—that she was born in Michigan, but had lived in Colorado for the past five years. About her mother and her sister. That she’d worked her way through university waiting tables, tending bar, and driving a delivery truck for a small shipping company in Denver.

  “And you have no boyfriend,” he said when she finished, circling back to his original topic.

  Why was he determined to talk about this? “Like I said, no.”

  “But you had one until recently.”

  “What?” She glanced at him, alarmed. “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged, the corner of his mouth quirking up. “I can smell things,” he said.

  “How the hell do you smell my old boyfriend?” she said. “We broke up over six months ago.”

  “I can’t smell him,” Ian explained. “I can smell apprehension coming off of you when the topic comes up. And anger. I can smell that now.”

  She huffed out a breath. She’d been feeling good about Ian, but now he was getting under her skin again. “Well, he cheated on me,” she said. “Can you smell that?”

  “No,” he said. “I can’t smell that.” She glanced over and saw him frowning. His green eyes looked chilly. “You want me to mess him up?”

  “No. Thank you. And we’re done talking about my love life, okay?” She stared ahead at the road, where whirls of snow blew across the pavement. “It isn’t that interesting. And my life as a whole hasn’t been as interesting as yours.” Or as dangerous. She felt privileged, lucky to have such stupid problems compared to what he’d been through.

  “It isn’t a contest, Anna,” he said. He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Okay, I shouldn’t have pried. I apologize. I’m on edge.”

  “Apology accepted.”

  He was quiet after that, staring out the window. It was a comfortable silence; Ian wasn’t naturally a talker, it seemed. Anna figured that after a lifetime of roaming alone, capped by a year in prison, silence was probably his usual mode.

  She kept quiet herself, not wanting to push him, thinking over everything he’d told her. But after a while, the silence felt heavy, and when she looked over at him, he was tense in his seat, his gaze straining out the passenger window.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked him.

  He pointed to a sign indicating an exit from the highway. “Turn off here,” he said, his voice curt.

  She signaled and exited. They were on a back road now, a two-lane blacktop that contained nothing but potholes and snow. “We’re not near Shifter Falls yet,” she said.

  “Keep going,” he said, almost sharp. “Up here. Pull over.”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Just do it.”

  Maybe he was sick or something. Maybe he needed to go to the bathroom and didn’t want to say anything. It was a little strange, but Anna pulled over to the side of the road. They were only minutes from the highway, but in this wilderness they could have been on the edge of the earth, with mountains stretching off before them cloaked in thick trees. The road stretched endlessly away into nothing.

  “What is it?” she said to Ian.

  He looked over at her. His eyes looked silver in the light, his expression serious. “Stay here,” he said, and he got out of the car.

  4

  It didn’t hit her at first, what he was doing. And then it did.

  Ian got out of the car and strode away, into the snow, toward the trees. As he walked, he unbuttoned his coat and dropped it to the ground.

  He was going to shift? Now?

  She turned off the car and got out, sliding through the snow after him. “Ian! What are you doing?”

  He unbuttoned the gray flannel shirt he was wearing and dropped it on top of the coat. Now he only had on a white t-shirt, which he pulled off over his head, dropping it, too. “You said shifters need to run,” he said. “I need to run.”

  “Right now?”

  “Right now.” He bent to untie his shoes, and Anna stood paralyzed watching him. His bare torso was lined with muscles, thick beneath his golden skin. Across his lower back was a set of scars, four parallels, as if claws had raked him. Probably from the cage fighting. We heal fast, but we scar, he’d said.

  But it was the tattoos that transfixed her. She’d read about pack tattoos in her textbook, but there were no pictures, only a description. Every shifter, the book had said, carried a tattoo of his animal, as well as a mark that indicated his pack if he was an elite member.

  Emblazoned over Ian’s right shoulder and across his shoulder blade was a wolf. It was done in dark ink, depicted in full run, its paws outstretched, its teeth bared. As he moved his arm, the muscles flexed and the wolf moved. It was beautiful and a little frightening at the same time, full of wild anger and unstoppable force. He only bore one other tattoo: on the knob of spine at th
e base of the back of his neck, a stylized D, small but prominent. The mark of the Donovan pack—the mark that he was a son of the alpha.

  “I don’t understand,” Anna managed to say as she stared at him. “Why now?”

  Ian kicked off his shoes and socks and stood looking her in the eye. “It’s been a year,” he said, carefully undoing his watch and adding it to the pile. “I’m short-tempered. I’m going out of my mind. I’ll be nicer when I’m finished, I promise.”

  “I’m supposed to agree to this when you just tried to run from me at the diner?”

  “I’ll come back,” he said.

  “How the hell do I know that?”

  He stepped closer to her. He was bigger, taller, his chest a wall of muscle. She could see the edges of the wolf where it wrapped around his upper arm. The wind blew icy chill down from the mountains, but he wasn’t the least bit cold. “Because I said I would,” he said, staring into her eyes.

  She stared back at him. This wasn’t the deal. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by his tattoo or his gorgeous body or his wolf or anything else. “It’s dark in an hour,” she said. “You have one hour, Ian. And then I get in this car and drive into Shifter Falls. In the dark. By myself.”

  A muscle flexed in his jaw. “I’ll be back in an hour,” he ground out. Then, as he watched her, a flicker of humor crossed his expression. “You may want to turn around,” he said. “This ain’t pretty.”

  Anna glanced down and saw that he had his hands on the button of his jeans and was undoing it. He wouldn’t, she thought crazily. He wouldn’t. But she whirled around just as he grabbed his jeans and boxers and pushed them down.

  “Jesus, Ian,” she said.

  He laughed, and then she heard the crunch of snow as he walked away from her. The footsteps sounded faster as he started to run.

  She turned back. He was almost to the line of the trees, and—oh, my God. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. Naked and barefoot, his powerful legs propelling him through the snow, his upper body leaned forward, his arms pumping. He was like an Olympic athlete, but picking up speed toward a pace no human could possibly accomplish. From this angle she could see his muscled, bare rear end and a hint… just a hint… You idiot, Anna berated herself as she watched him run. You should have looked at the front of him when you had the chance.