Zurlo, Michele - Riley [Daughters of Circe 3] (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) (2 page)

Riley knew without a doubt that thing pinning her attacker to the ground wasn’t just any werewolf.

“Soren.”

At the sound of her voice, the wolf backed up, moving off the man. He assumed a defensive stance between them.

A thousand emotions roiled through Riley. The brief attack had left her stunned. Adrenaline pumped through her veins, and her heart felt like it beat from her throat. Added to that, seeing the werewolf responsible for ruining her life made her feel strangled from within.

One more growl issued from Soren’s throat and followed the attacker as he ran in the opposite direction. Relief didn’t have time to take hold inside Riley. The doctor had left a half hour ago, and the receptionist had gone with him. This wasn’t the first time Riley locked up alone, but it would definitely be the last.

The wolf turned, lifting his head to meet her gaze. Those silver eyes were rimmed with teal, and Riley shrank against the hard plastic of her car. One hand went to her throat while the other fumbled behind her for the handle of the door. She didn’t fear for her life as much as she feared for her sister and her nieces. She would die before she would give up their location. She hadn’t spent a decade on the run just to have it all blow up in one horrible moment.

He threw his head back and howled, a singular, lonely noise that tore at her heart even as she struggled with fear.

In the distance, a car backfired. Soren’s howl cut short, and he wheeled around, snarling viciously. He bounded off toward the direction her attacker had taken. Riley had a second to wonder whether he planned to kill the man, and then she saw the trail of blood.

That hadn’t been a car backfiring. Someone had shot Soren, and now he was gone. Part of her felt relief that he couldn’t follow her home. A deeper part of her ached at the thought he might be lying somewhere, bleeding to death on the side of the road. Finding the strength and coordination to open her door almost proved too challenging. Her fingertips felt ten sizes larger as she fumbled with the door and fell inside. The familiar scent of leather and stale fries did little to jolt her back to reality, but she managed to close the door and start the car.

* * * *

By the time she arrived home, the events of the night had taken their toll. Her hands shook so badly that she dropped her keys when she tried to open her car door. The safety of her house taunted her from a few feet away. She felt around on the floor between the door and the seat until she found them, hating every second of this evening. As someone who prided herself on being strong when she needed to be strong, this wasn’t how she wanted to react.

She always promised herself that if the time came, she would deal with Soren the way he needed to be dealt with. Maybe Torrey couldn’t bring herself to kill him, and maybe Shade couldn’t either, but that wouldn’t stop Riley. She could deal the death blow if it came to that.

Then why did the idea of him being hurt—shot—bring such pain?

Her door jerked open, which had a ripple effect on her reverie. Riley looked up to find her neighbor standing there. Tall, handsome, with brown hair going grey around his temples, Calvin Atchison was the kind of middle-aged man Riley always pictured when she thought of herself as a similar-aged woman. Maybe in ten or fifteen years. She wasn’t yet forty, so she had time.

He cocked his head to the side. “You okay, kiddo?”

Technically, Cal was her landlord. He lived next door and owned both houses. Usually, he left her alone. Every once in a while, he checked on her. Riley didn’t mind. He treated her like a kid sister, and she missed having an older sibling around.

“Yeah—I—yeah,” she stammered, uncertain what to say. She still didn’t know whether being attacked in the parking lot at work or saved by a wolf that had caused her so much heartache was worse. She pasted on her best smile and hoped with all her might for him to accept her assurance without question. It usually worked. Shade had said more than once that Riley had some magic, though neither she nor Torrey could sense anything extraordinary.

He smiled and backed away. “Okay. I’m home all weekend. You call if you need anything.”

She nodded and fled into her house. She locked and checked every single door and window. The single-story ranch didn’t stand a chance against Soren if he wanted to get inside, but it was all the protection she had right then.

The rational part of her brain urged her to call the police to make a report. After all, she’d nearly been mugged. Or raped. She wasn’t sure what the bad man had wanted. Nothing he pressed against her body had been hard in a sexually-excited kind of way.

Three hours later, an exhausted Riley let two police officers out of her home. They’d wanted her to go down to the station to file her report, but she was too afraid to leave the house. In the back of her mind, she kept thinking that the inside of the house represented the only safe space. Even the parking lot at work, which wasn’t in a bad area, no longer seemed like someplace she could go by herself.

She hated this fearful, cautious person she’d become.

And she hated even more that she had repeated and erotic dreams about the man responsible. What sane person imagined the feel of her captor’s lips and the way his muscles moved beneath her questing fingers moments before he’d set her away from him and tell her he wasn’t ready to take the relationship to that level?

His eyes and the bulge in his pants had said differently, but she hadn’t argued. She hadn’t been allowed to argue. The charm he’d placed on her to make her think she was in love with him also kept her agreeable. The real Riley would have had him naked and writhing on the bed in no time.

Thank goodness for Soren’s warped sense of morality.

Riley snuggled on the sofa under a light blanket. This was, strategically, the best place for her to both sit and sleep as she watched for attackers. Also, the coolness of the handgun nestled in her palm provided a reassurance she desperately needed. The safety remained on, and the gun hid under the blanket, but she was ready to use it. She’d spent a lot of time at the firing range over the past ten years, and she could hit any target, moving or not, from a variety of positions.

A thudding sound woke her from a dead sleep. Riley popped up, her nerves on high alert before her brain was quite awake. She pointed the gun toward the bathroom, the source of the noise. Creeping quietly, she crossed the room and entered the hall.

A light glowed softly under the door. For some reason, the light switch in there had a dimmer. A wave of cold fear chilled Riley to the bone, but sympathy wasn’t far behind. He’d been shot after saving her from a mugger. Though she’d locked the doors and windows, she knew he had enough magic to allow him to overcome those safety measures.

Too bad he wasn’t a vampire who needed to be invited inside.

Riley pushed open the door and nearly dropped her gun. Soren stood at her sink, his naked ass pointed toward the mirror as he tried to maneuver a pair of tweezers over a small, bleeding wound.

The rest of him lacked clothing as well. Broad shoulders topped a chest corded with solid muscle. Just below his navel, a trail of blond hair curled downward, thickening to swirl around his incredibly large cock. Riley gasped at the size of the thing at rest. She couldn’t imagine how big it would be once aroused.

When he had kidnapped her, he had cast a charm to make her think she loved him. Though she had offered him many opportunities to take advantage of the circumstances, he hadn’t done more than let her kiss him every now and again. While she remembered the handsome features of his face in vivid detail, she hadn’t seen him without clothes, and so her fantasies were highly speculative.

He grinned at her, and her face flamed. After the events of the night, she should be a little more terrified at finding a large, formidable predator in her bathroom. She shouldn’t gawk at him and try to imagine fitting his hard cock inside her wet pussy.

And it was wet.

No doubt he could smell her arousal. Fucking wolf.

“If you’re not going to shoot me with that thing, can you put it down and help me? I can’t quite reach where the bullet went in and I don’t want to heal around it. I’d only have to cut it out later.”

His rich baritone reverberated through her senses. Shade had told her several times that Soren’s charm wouldn’t have worked if she hadn’t already found him attractive. Time didn’t seem to have dimmed her body’s response to his animal magnetism.

It would help if he wasn’t naked. She looked around the small room. “Where are your clothes?”

He chuckled, and the memory of sitting in front of a warm fire, drinking cocoa and chatting companionably came to mind. “Probably where I left them. My jeans don’t exactly fit when I’m in wolf form.” His grin grew and his teal eyes glowed with a predatory light. “What’s wrong, Riley? Are you afraid you can’t control yourself around a naked man? I’m willing, sweetheart, but I’d like to have the bullet out first.”

Reaching out, she slid the dimmer upward, and the soft, sexy glow turned harsh and real, just like life. She couldn’t say she owed him assistance just because he saved her from the mugger. That one good deed wasn’t enough to erase his list of sins, but she couldn’t stand to see anyone suffer.

She motioned with her hand. “Turn around and put your hands on the counter. If you move, I’ll shoot you.”

Soren grunted, but he did as she asked. “You know, a bullet won’t kill me. You could empty that entire clip into me and it wouldn’t do more than piss me off.”

“I have silver bullets.” She tucked the gun under her arm and bathed the tweezers in rubbing alcohol. “Made for just this occasion.”

“Silver doesn’t do anything extra to a wolf, Riley. That’s a myth.”

She knelt behind him. The gun made it awkward, so she set it on the floor next to her knees. “It’s a figure of speech. I coated each bullet with wolfsbane. We both know how deadly that can be.”

Soren flinched, and she knew she’d hit a nerve. He had used wolfsbane in an attempt to incapacitate his brother, Shade. At the time, Shade had been protecting Torrey from Soren, who wanted to sacrifice her and harvest her powers. The dose had nearly killed Shade.

Though Torrey didn’t harbor any ill will toward Soren, Riley had a difficult time forgiving the man who kidnapped her and tried to murder her sister. And she absolutely hated that her body heated just from being this close to him.

“Riley, I couldn’t help it. A compulsion isn’t something I can control. It controls me.” He looked over his shoulder, an appeal in his eyes she found difficult to ignore.

She dug the tweezers into the wound, which already had begun to close. Perhaps she could have been a little gentler, but she didn’t feel he deserved a light touch. Her aggressive search for the bullet put an end the words coming from Soren’s mouth.

“That’s just an excuse. Only a weak man lets a compulsion control him.” She dug at him as much as she dug for the bullet. It didn’t take long to find, but it did require a fair amount of tugging before it finally slid out.

Blood seeped from the wound. Riley grabbed a tissue to dab it away. Soren ripped it from her hand and whirled around. “Don’t touch it.”

She raised a brow. “I just pulled a bullet out of your ass. I’ve already touched your blood.” To prove her point, she held up her hands. Smears of his blood coated her fingertips. He hadn’t bled much, but she couldn’t very well access the little chunk of metal without touching him, and she didn’t have latex gloves lying around.

Besides, werewolves didn’t carry disease. She wasn’t worried about contracting anything from Soren.

Color leached from his face. He grabbed her by the wrists and shoved her hands under the faucet. Turning on only the hot water, he fumbled for the soap.

Riley watched his face as he scrubbed her hands clean. During the time of her captivity, which he made seem more like a vacation, she had seen flickers of fear and uncertainty in his eyes from time to time. However, they always disappeared quickly. This time, it stayed put.

“Soren? Are you okay?” This couldn’t have been the first time he’d been injured. A glance at his torso showed several old scars, and he hadn’t exactly been writhing in pain when she’d walked in on him trying to remove the bullet.