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few things capable of
arresting the wilding progression that eventually obliterated the human in a
werewolf was finding a true mate.
     
    CHAPTER
THREE
    After slamming the door
and locking it, an action with more than a little symbolic meaning, Holly
sagged against the wall in her perfectly textured, utterly beige entryway and
smothered a sob with both her hands. It really wasn’t like her. Nothing about
her life lately was like her.
    She wasn’t interesting
enough to have been attacked by a freaking werewolf, of all things, and just
because she’d gotten tired of waiting for her college “friends” to finish
getting wasted at one of the local bars and had started to walk home through
that dark parking lot alone. There had been no reason to think it was going to
be that dangerous, on a bright night with a full moon, clear enough to see for
miles.
    Holly snorted mid-sob.
It had been a full moon. Werewolf. Full moon. But she’d also already learned
that real werewolves—she snorted again despite herself—didn’t depend on the
moon for whether or not they shifted.
    And that was another
matter. She wasn’t educated or worldly or sophisticated or
alpha-FBI-secret-agent enough to be working even as a research analyst for some
covert government agency helping “strike teams” track and exterminate dangerous
supernaturals that humans never knew existed right in their midst. Still a
whole semester from finishing her communications and computer data systems
degrees, Holly was struggling to man her desk at the Agency and complete her
coursework with night classes three times a week. It was Friday night; that was
where she was supposed to be right then, in class.
    Instead she was moping
over ice cream and running into Dustin Berg out on the walkway and kissing him.
Holly wasn’t skinny enough or charming enough or flirty enough to let herself
think for even a second that a man that tall, that fit, that good-looking, that
confident and outgoing would kiss her out of anything but pity, curiosity, or
indiscriminately drunken horniness. And it wasn’t like Holly to lower herself,
to sacrifice what dignity she’d earned over years of lonely discipline, in
order to serve any of those instincts. Even for Dustin Berg.
    “Damn, what’s gotten
into you, Holly?” she asked herself, still slumped to one side against the
wall, still shuddering periodically in a mixture of snorts and tears.
    He came around the
corner, just one step, just into view, saying quietly, “I have asked myself the
same thing many times.”
    Holly’s whole body
jerked in shock at realizing she wasn’t alone in her own townhouse. She sucked
in a gasp so hard and so huge that it came back out as a choking hiccup, and
she threw her hands over her mouth again.
    This made him smile, a
sad little quirk at one corner of his remarkably full, pretty mouth—this total
stranger standing just inside her living room, just around the corner toward
her dining room and kitchen and that sliding glass door she was always
forgetting to lock. He stood sideways to her, looking at Holly over the
shoulder of his black overcoat, which was tattered and grimy in a way that made
her think he was a homeless person. His black woolen pants, black sweater,
black scarf, they were all oversized and threadbare and torn, stained and
soiled. In the light of the overhead lamp, the splatter pattern on the toes of
his heavy black boots shone a dull brown-red that made her suspect the drops
were dried blood. She tried not to stare too knowingly at that.
    Speaking slowly,
gently, breathlessly, Holly asked, “What are you doing in my house? Maybe
you’re lost? I don’t know you.”
    The lean black-haired
man, his skin pale even for winter, gave Holly another smile. It was wider,
less sad, more indulgent this time. “You do.”
    Staring, Holly tried to
place him, though she was positive she’d have remembered meeting a man who
looked so remarkable. He was in his mid to late thirties, maybe.